


In Circulus Veritas

by apiphile



Series: full circle [1]
Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Gen, Thor is a golden retriever, but only sometimes, everyone's anger management issues, everyone's daddy issues, i don't care what your fanon is i'm writing mine, i wrote most of this in a notebook on a toilet, inconsistent and unspellchecked, liar liar pants and indeed rest of body on fire, loki's endless xanatos gambit, meandering dialogue, no editorial decisions, no one listens to tony stark, sometimes it's really nice to write a fic where no one dies or has sex, soy una pera, taking a fairly lax approach to my own fanon, taking an 'eh' approach to canon, villains and fools have privileges denied to heroes, you needed to know that
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-25
Updated: 2014-01-25
Packaged: 2018-01-10 00:44:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 21,198
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1152778
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apiphile/pseuds/apiphile
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Loki of Asgard is inadvertently made into an oracle of the truth and everything goes horribly wrong.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In Circulus Veritas

**Author's Note:**

  * For [jar](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jar/gifts), [LizaPod](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LizaPod/gifts).



Afterward, it was surprisingly hard to work out who to pin the blame on. That didn't stop anyone from trying, of course: Fury blamed Stark, whose fault the idea was, according to him. Tony insisted that he'd been against it from the start; Hill privately blamed Coulson for not stopping them from being so stupid (which was after all most of his job); Coulson blamed Hill for not keeping him informed of precisely how stupid everyone had become.

Barton, however, said that in the absence of the security footage - and why _was_ it missing? - it was impossible to figure out who came up with the whole big dumb scheme.

The one thing any one of S.H.I.E.L.D. or the Initiative could really agree on was that the whole thing was best buried under a great big pile of official secrets and unfinished paperwork and never, ever let out into the light of day. Ever.

Unfortunately for these institutions and the pride of those involved, secrets have this way of getting out, and so here is the story of their impressively awful fuck-up.

It begins not with the lost conversation to which blame could readily be attached, alas, but with a series of terrible and strange events: first, over Delhi a rip opened in the sky and a thousand thousand horrible hairy warriors from beyond the veil of death poured forth and started, in the most colloquial sense possible, fucking everyone's shit up.

The people of Delhi were understandably unhappy about this: the Avengers Initiative, now operating once more with the aid of a mostly-balanced esoteric doctor of Strange As Fuck Physics (a Furyism), managed to neutralise both vent and warriors only after a fortnight of severe, unmitigated fuckery.

About eight hours later, ten-foot-tall lizards in biological armour burst into Lagos, Accra, Kinshasa, and for some reason, Ghent, and proceeded to annoy and kill a lot of people.

Mobilising the requisite members took a little longer this time, and for the first forty-eight hours the team consisted of Rogers, Barton, and Romanov running themselves ragged; in the end Fury had to call in an expert on reptilian life forms. He was, in no particular order: missing an arm, reluctant to help, on leave from a mental institution, and largely confused by the invaders for some time.

However, the situation was eventually dragged under control, albeit in quite a creative manner; several zoos gained new Komodo dragons as a result, and building contractors on two continents went into overdrive.

Four hours after this problem was resolved to everyone's satisfaction (barring Dr Connors, who was returned to the mental institution), three island-sized deep-sea monsters broke the waters outside Rio de Janeiro, Havana, and - much to the disgust of the residents still rebuilding after Chitauri, storms, falling planes, and an unexpected loss by the Yankees triggering a riot - New York. Reports that Steve Rogers greeted this development with an exasperated and very twenty-first century swear word may not be at all exaggerated.

After a hectic three days in which Dr Bruce Banner did not get to put a shirt on _once_ but did get to punch a lot of squelchy tentacled things from beyond the dimensions of earth, everything settled down enough for an explanation to be sought.

"It's Loki," said Tony, who appeared to regard Dr Banner's water bottle as his own and was screwing and unscrewing the lid. "It's always Loki. Whenever there's interdimensional bullshit that asshole is always behind it."

"That 'asshole' is still my brother," Thor advised him.

Tony Stark, the definitive only child, failed to give the gravitas of this pronouncement due consideration, and instead repeated the word "asshole" with such force that the lid flew off his bottle and rolled under Fury's raised foot.

"Loki is dead," said Steve, applying himself to the known facts. He looked around the room for confirmation. "At least, that's... what we have on file... right?"

He caught Coulson's eye; Coulson only shrugged and continued to stand like a very attentive statue in the corner of the room, instead of sitting with everyone else. Death had this peculiar habit of being non-permanent these days: it was possible to see the thought stealing through Steve's mind like a scolding.

"Ah," said Thor, shifting uncomfortably in a seat he was marginally too large for. One might have blamed his armour for this fidgeting, but his expression was transparent with guilt, and all around him came a heavy, uniform sigh.

"He's not dead?" Steve stared around the room again and came to a hasty rest on Thor. Thor looked even more profoundly uncomfortable and made a point of avoiding Nick Fury's eye, which only served to incriminate him further.

"Excuse the fuck out of you?" said Fury, who never missed the opportunity to use an expletive when one arose. He kicked away the lid of Dr Banner's water bottle. "Are you telling me my files are wrong, now?"

"Um," Thor elaborated, with a rather eloquent expression. He cleared his throat a few times.

"He's alive, isn't he?" sighed Hill, under her breath.

"There is an instrument of unknown manufacture and high complexity in Asgard," said Thor, carefully avoiding everyone's gaze equally, which led to him staring at the light panels on the ceiling like a naughty schoolboy. "Although as it is made out of gold it is easy to assume it was made by the dwarves. It chronicles the lives of the ruling family in Asgard. Or at least," he corrected himself, "it ticks, like a clock, for three of us... and not for two, as it should."

"I thought you said he was adopted," Tony pointed out, jabbing a finger at Thor - Steve reached over the table and took the lidless bottle out of his hand before he could hurl water everywhere. "You definitely said he was adopted. Why is this thing tracking him? He's adopted."

"It doesn't know that," said Thor, with a shrug that contained a small but visible threat. "It only knows that Loki was once one of the ruling family of Asgard, and does not think he is dead."

"The point is," said Fury, cutting across them, "you knew he was alive and you didn't _tell_ me. You didn't tell _anyone_ and especially not _me_."

Thor, and indeed everyone in the room, including the usually motionless Coulson, leaned gently back from Fury. Dr Banner appeared to be concentrating rather hard on maintaining regular breathing.

"I meant to bring it up," Thor mumbled, "if something warranted the mention."

"The whole world has been spitting out extradimensional threats like cherry pits," said Romanov with a level voice and only a slight quirk of her eyebrow to betray her impatience. "It must have occurred to you."

"There is no _proof_ that it is him," said Thor, as serenely as a God of Thunder can when an entire room full of mostly super-powered people are giving him an array of filthy looks.

"Oh come _on_ ," Tony complained.

"He's not grandstanding so visibly this time," said Steve, making a case for balance and only receiving an incoherent wave of Tony's hand. Once he had worked out that Tony was asking for the water he passed it, circumspectly, to Banner. "If it's him at all."

"He's not stupid," said Barton, drawing his arms in front of him without apparently realising how defensive he looked.

"Debatable," Romanov murmured.

"He's not going to show off this time."

"I think we could at least consider other sources," said Banner, seeming oblivious to the conflicting reactions this provoked. He tapped the side of his returned water bottle with his index finger. "Loki isn't the sole source of the world's misery."

"Well right now he's the sole source of mine," Fury snapped, hands on hips. "And I will sleep easier knowing he ain't _able_ to unleash any more weirdness on this earth, do I make myself clear?"

Hill shot a look at Coulson and mouthed, _he sleeps_?

Coulson, fending off a circle of similar incredulity, was unable to provide a discreet answer, and only coughed politely.

"Unfortunately," said Thor, spreading his hands in front of him, "the only prison that can hold him is on Asgard, and I do not know where Loki is."

"Not on Asgard?" Steve hazarded, displaying his customary discomfort with the idea of a corporeal viking heaven, alongside a characteristic desire to be useful, and an unnecessarily large bicep.

"All I can divine from the instrument is that he is not in the realms of the dead," said Thor, frowning. He gradually clenched his overly huge hands into alarmingly big fists, and said, "I saw him die, on the blackened sands of Malekith's dark world--"

"Loki's ability to outwit death is well-known," said Dr Banner, who had moved on to tapping the side of his bottle with a pen instead, watching the ripples move through the surface of the water as if he was meditating. "Can we concentrate on not letting him outwit _us_ \- if all this ... drama... is down to him at all?"

After this, the security footage went missing. No one can agree now on whose idea it was to call on Dr Strange: his previous contract work for S.H.I.E.L.D. meant they were all aware of him, except possibly Thor, and while everyone claimed they'd thought it was a bad idea at the time, there's enough evidence that details like universal objection don't impede the progress of shit ideas once the ideas are out in the open, as anyone who has worked in marketing or local government can tell you.

But call in Dr Strange they did, with a brief interlude to shut down a large black void-like blob which fell out of the sky onto Moscow and started sucking out all the electricity.

Dr Strange stood in the rebuilt, echoing headquarters of S.H.I.E.L.D., wearing an absurdly high collar and an implacable expression, and pressed the tips of his fingers together.

"Do you conjure up your little goblin slaves with your Disney Villain couture or is that just an incidentally terrible 1970s fashion choice, Maleficent?" asked Tony, who was wearing about 35% of his suit and approximately 0% of his extremely diminutive store of tact and good manners. Perhaps he thought that the simultaneous absence of his shirt excused him from being polite, but it was not an opinion shared by anyone else present.

Dr Strange, like anyone with sense, ignored the jibe. Steve gently slid over, and laid one hand flat across Tony's mouth, the other over the back of his head, and nodded for Strange to continue uninterrupted.

"Why have you summoned me?" Strange asked Fury, with a marked coolness, even for him. "I grant there have been many unworldly phenomena of late--"

"No shit," said Barton.

"--but none of it is of occult origin, I assure you. How may I assist you, Fury?"

His mouth may have been covered, but this did little to stop Tony’s derision from seeping out.

“We need you to find, and bind, him,” said Coulson, passing Dr Strange a tablet which he did not take.

“A name might be of some help,” said Strange, his hands clasped together, “as might a _reason_.”

“Information’s all on here,” said Coulson, pushing the tablet at the magician again. Strange gave him a tart look, and kept his hands together.

“Unless you have some great desire to short out your iPad,” sighed Strange, stop trying to put it in my hands and just _tell_ me who you want found.” He sounded a lot less mystical and a lot more irritated now.

“It’s not an iPad, it’s a non-proprietary tablet computer,” said Coulson.

“Now why did no one let _me_ do that,” Steve said, under his breath. 

“You wouldn’t destroy our hardware as needlessly,” said Romanov, from the far side of Tony.

“Liar,” said Tony, into Steve’s palm.

“We want you to get Loki into our hands and under our control,” said Fury at last. “Can you do it?”

“No,” said Strange.

“Oh,” said Steve.

“Not without good reason,” finished the mystic.

“The constant hail of monsters from every fucking direction this month not enough reason for you, Strange?” Fury demanded, slamming his hands onto his hips so hard that everyone else was surprised that he hadn’t dislocated one or both of them.

“I am unconvinced Loki is the source of the degeneration of the barrier between worlds,” said Strange, boldly ignoring Fury’s sharp, lopsided stare and intimidating body language.

“That’s what I said,” Thor complained, unheard.

“And _I_ want him contained,” snapped Fury, his hands off and then back on his hips again. “So that if there’s another short sharp shower of shit from beyond, I have one less possibility to investigate.”

“Fewer,” said Strange. He stroked his pencil moustache with his fingertip. “All night. I can conjure him within a circle, but it will only last until the turn of the season. And I can’t silence him.”

“What do we want that for?” Barton asked, startled out of whatever reverie he was occupying. “Without that freaky sceptre –“

“It is my _understanding_ ,” Strange interrupted, holding up a hand palm-out, “that this Loki is a powerful and accomplished magician.”

Although he had not looked to Thor for confirmation, the Asgardian inclined his head and said, “He is. He has all out mother’s tricks.”

“I guess he really does fight like a girl,” Tony said to Steve’s hand, apparently forgetting the time that Loki had hurled him out of a window – or remembering one of several occasions when a woman had done the same thing. 

Romanov raised an eyebrow; Coulson offered her his taser, and Thor scowled. 

“Frigga was a valiant warrior and a great magician, and she died in battle, defending an equally brave and valiant woman,” he said. There was an edge in his voice in the same way that there is an edge to a Claymore: double-sided, and liable to be used as a bludgeon if it does not cut enough. “Listen to Strange and keep your mouth _closed_.”

“I didn’t say there was anything _wrong_ with fighting like a woman,” Tony protested. “Natasha fights like a – well a machine, if I’m honest, and—“

Coulson put the taser ostentatiously in Romanov’s palm and returned to his corner; Tony clamped his jaws shut. Steve gave his face a none-too-gentle squeeze and muttered, “Try not to insult _everyone_ , if you can.”

Strange pressed the tips of his fingers together slowly, and waited with the air of a high school principal for the bickering to die down.

“My brother can sow untold discord with a single word,” Thor warned, looking to Strange, “or soothe the most violent of storms. He was famed for it. Loki Silvertongue, we called him.”

“Innovative,” said Barton. Tony tried to high-five him, but Romanov waved the taser at him: just a gentle, surreptitious jiggle, to make him draw back his hand unfived.

“And Loki Liesmith, too, I have heard,” Strange went on. “But to shackle this prowess requires more power than I have at my disposal. I must call upon forces greater than my own.”

“But you _can_ do it,” insisted Fury, never one to let worry or doubt stand between him and an achievable goal.

“It is possible,” agreed Strange, raising a finger to indicate caution which set Tony off with inexplicable giggles, “but the forces of which I speak are often almost as intractable and deceptive as Loki himself—“

“Strange,” sighed Fury. “Just do it.”

In order to keep the circle of containment primed at all times, Strange explained, there would have to be someone on guard. In order to make their guardianship effective, they must be present for the initial summoning ritual. If Mr Stark wished to absent himself, Strange suggested, no one would think any the worse of him for it.

Mr Stark suggested that Strange go fuck himself, and professed great interest in his weirdo kooky bullshit.

Strange expressed relief to have passed muster in the eyes of such a noted sceptic, with such intense sarcasm that the air was thoroughly laden with it, and sighed.

For reasons which he never explained, possibly because they could not have held up to the least cross-examination, Fury chose to omit Hill and Selvig from the guardianship roster and to limit those present to members of the Initiative, himself, and Coulson. 

No one raised the question of what, exactly, was supposed to happen when the entire time were required to – just for an example – fight off an invasion from another dimension, as had been happening with depressing regularity of late. Everyone later claimed to have been thinking about it. 

For reasons of confidentiality, the precise nature of the summoning ritual and the name of that which was summoned must remain secret: to tell anyone the name of a thing is after all to grant them its power. Or at least, so runs the principle of advertising.

However, soon Strange had before him a large dark cloudy thing with a volatile and barely-glimpsed interior and a voice like Glenn Beck having one of his routine breakdowns. Strange made a complex movement with two fingers through the air, and said:

“I require your service.”

“What would you have of me, mortal magician?” whined the thing. It added, “Shut that man up,” as Tony again began cackling at the absurdity of the situation. 

“Button it, Tony,” said Fury, in the kind of voice that could have stopped a bar fight dead in its tracks.

“Enchant this circle,” said Strange, indicating an area of the floor marked out in what was apparently a dilute mix of blood, salt, sulphur powder, and gold dust (“it’s quicker,” Strange had assured them. “I have performed numerous experiments in this area.”), and which had roughly the same dimensions as a standard office cubicle. 

“I am not falling for that a second time,” said the thing. “You magicians are all the same.”

“It is not meant to hold _you_ ,” said Strange. “It is for the imprisonment of an Asgardian.”

“Good,” said the thing, giving the impression of staring hard at Thor. “What enchantment must I place on this Asgardian’s prison?”

“Is that an ifrit?” asked Banner, looking at the thing as if he’d just worked something out.

“How in the hell would any of _us_ know?” asked Steve, around the same time that Romanov said, _yes_.

“This prison is prepared that when its captive is in place, he cannot be removed from the circle under his own power. He must be removed from it by me, or one of his guardians,” said Strange. “I wish that he also be unable to cast magics from within.”

“Standard,” said the thing that was possibly an ifrit. “Is that all?”

“We also want him not to lie to us,” said Fury.

The ifrit gave a good go of glaring at him, for an indistinct and shadowy thing which didn’t appear so much to have eyes as ruptures into a hot and hellish interior.

“To be able to speak nothing but the truth,” said Strange.

“Which do you want?” the ifrit demanded, huffily. “I can’t do both.”

“They’re the same thing,” said Steve, confused. He addressed his appeal to Fury, as his XO, and not the steaming ifrit that smelled of hot carcasses and volcanoes, or Strange and his hair so smooth it seemed to have been painted on. “Aren’t they?”

“Not even close,” blurted Tony, who had a lot of first-hand experience in the grey area between ‘truth’ and ‘lie’, as well as ‘life’ and ‘death’, ‘straight’ and ‘gay’, and for that matter ‘functional’ and ‘committed under a mental health act’. “Don’t let him get off with ‘can’t lie’, that leaves him way too much scope to just lie by omission.”

“He’s right,” said Romanov. Tony raised both his arms in a victory salute: Romanov sighed and tased him in the armpit. 

“So to clarify,” said the ifrit, carefully, “you want the prisoner in this circle to have no choice but to tell only the truth, for as long as he is within the circle?”

“Yes,” said Strange.

“Done,” said the ifrit. “Can I have my hat back now?”

Strange retrieved a small vial full of black smoke from inside his robes and stepped over the unconscious body of Tony Stark in order to uncork the thing beside the ifrit.

“That’s not all of it,” the ifrit complained.

“You will get the rest when our compact is completed,” said Strange, “and now I abjure thee – be gone from this place.”

When the air had cleared again, Banner said, “It – he – it – really did all that just to get its hat back?”

“Hat is a mistranslation,” said Strange, looking almost sheepish for a moment, “and one which I have never seen fit to correct.”

“Mistranslation for what?” asked Steve, trying to keep up with events and haul Tony to his feet at the same time. He had little success in either camp, somewhat hampered in the latter by the fact that Tony had not yet regained his senses and was moving like a confused and possibly stoned octopus out of water.

“Testicles,” said Strange, standing out of the way.

“You cut off an ifrit’s _balls_?” Fury said, apparently a little impressed in spite of himself.

“When you have someone’s balls in your hand they do whatever you want them to,” said Strange, archly. “Excusing Ms Romanov’s presence, of course.”

“It is a tactic I have used myself,” she said, with a very tiny smile.

Barton twitched. 

The team broke for lunch – an army, after all, marches on its stomach – and when Tony had stopped his involuntary impressions of a man with no muscular control, and Strange had checked and double-checked and triple-checked that the circle’s perimeter was intact, the ritual began.

For reasons of prudence, the ritual was performed while Romanov casually pointed the recharged taser at the small of Tony’s back, as no one wanted Strange to find himself distracted mid-summoning. Not even after Tony pointed out that it would probably course a kinda hilarious splicing of fractions of Loki across time and space did Romanov relent and remove the taser.

There was an expectant silence in the room at the conclusion of the summoning incantation, but no Loki.

“Bit anticlimactic,” Banner commented.

“Sh,” said Strange.

The centre of the circle began to grow indistinct, as if the air molecules there were somehow blocking light. There was a certain taste of tin in the air of the rest of the room. It grew cold, and colder, until Romanov was the only person not shivering.

The darkened air in the circle began to crystallise.

After a moment, Barton said, “Are those veins?”

“Hands up everyone who is an expert on the circulatory systems of Asgardians?” said Banner, looking around him. “No one? Okay.”

“Those _are_ bones,” Barton said, a little later.

“I could live without the running commentary,” said Steve, looking a little queasy.

“What the hell organ is _that_?” Barton asked.

“Natasha,” said Fury, “you still have that taser?”

Barton put a hand over his own mouth.

At last there was a very plainly a tall, vaguely humanoid shape standing in the circle like a waxwork with no face. The eeriness of this was compounded by the way in which it seemed to be coming from a long way away, and the skin of the figure was somehow both pinkish-beige and frosty blue at the same time. This was exceptionally evident as the unfinished Loki was entirely naked.

“Where are his clothes?” Barton asked, moving away from Romanov as if he could actually get far away enough that she wouldn’t be able to tase him.

“The circle strips him of all illusions and requires him to appear as he truly is,” said Strange absently, his arms raised and his face a crinkle of concentration.

“Clothes are an illusion now?” Barton said in the tone of someone considering his own future possible pick-up lines.

“ _His_ are, apparently,” Strange continued to concentrate on the faceless form within the circle. Features, blurry and vague, were at last beginning to form, along with a thick mane of blue-black hair.

“Does that mean the entire time we’ve been fighting him,” Steve asked, a little unnerved, “he’s been naked?”

Thor shrugged. “There are stranger practices in the Nine Realms.”

“Shh,” said Romanov.

With a gentle hum like the sound of a far-off engine, Strange lowered his raised hands, and Loki opened his eyes.

The dual view of his skin in Thor-like Asgardian flesh and Frost Giant blue was replicated in his eyes: both white-with-iris-and-pupil and red without feature or landmark, and the effect was so difficult to process as to be painful to look at.

Loki looked about him with more patience than might be expected and refused to oblige anyone’s sense of superiority by walking into the edge of the containment field and hurting himself. Instead he remained where he was, and after a while closed his eyes – much to everyone’s relief – and said: “Why?”

“Those massive rents in the walls between realms mean anything to you?” asked Fury with a certain amount of sarcasm.

“What rents?” Loki asked, without any attempt at an innocent expression.

“They have been tearing through Midgard like knife wounds,” said Thor, unsticking his tongue from whatever he had originally intended to say, “and there is no celestial line-up of realms to explain it any more.”

“Can’t say I’ve noticed,” said Loki, smiling at him. “Or that I care.” He opened his mouth again, frowned deeply, and said, “And I meant to pretend that I did, so shall I assume that you have placed me under some sort of enchantment?”

No one answered him. Thor said: “Where have you been?”

“Asgard,” said Loki, who promptly looked annoyed with himself.

“ASGARD?” Thor boomed, distressed. He gripped the handle of Mjolnir more tightly. “Doing what?”

“Ruling it,” said Loki, with tangible smugness. “Surely you noticed that it prospers rather more than it was.”

“What have you done to Father?” Thor roared, taking a step towards to the containment field. Perhaps a little unwisely, Steve put a hand in front of him to prevent him going any further. Perhaps a little unbelievably, Thor actually stopped when he did.

“Hidden him,” sighed Loki, trying to bite his own tongue.

“Where?”

“In the cells,” said Loki, growing ever more irritated with his own unwitting honesty with each passing sentence.

“Which cell?” Thor barked, leaning over Steve’s arm as if it were the strongest barrier in the world, rather than an obstacle which he had barged past without noticing on many occasions before. 

“The empty one, of course.” Loki rolled his eyes. As they were still both with and without whites the effect was deeply unpleasant to watch. “Mine. I thought it was appropriate.”

“And what have you disguised him as, then? It can hardly be you.”

“A chair,” said Loki with a certain amount of malice. “Maybe someone will find him when they try to _sit_ on him.”

Thor scowled at the floor. Steve removed his arm, and the Asgardian lowered his hammer. “He has not engineered the destruction of Midgard, this time.”

“I have no interest in Midgard while I have Asgard,” said Loki. “It may have been an embarrassing defeat—“ he put his hand over his mouth, but continue to talk through his fingers, “—but there are thousands of other worlds with which my brother _isn’t_ in love.”

“I must return him to Asgard, to free Father from whatever enchantment he has imprisoned him with,” Thor said, turning to implore Fury. Fury only shrugged.

“This Circle of Truth thing works?” he asked Strange.

“Demonstrably,” said Strange, a little testy and quite impatient. He continued tapping his fingers on his forearms even after Fury had turned away.

“Asshole, have you been spitting warriors and monsters out on my goddamn Earth?” Fury asked Loki, with the directness and absence of diplomacy that had ensured he was never one of the public faces of his own institution.

Loki regarded him with headache-inducing eyes, and said, “No,” firmly and with disgust. “I have neither the power nor the inclination for such a crude and unsophisticated trick.”

Fury put his hands on his hips. “Alright, Thor,” he said. “Take this fucker out of here.”

“He can’t,” said Strange, under his breath.

“What,” said Fury. 

“You wanted to contain him for as long as possible,” said Strange, with a slightly apologetic look. “As a fail-safe, to prevent anyone from potentially being tortured into releasing a prisoner before his time—“

“Motherfucker, what the exact hell are you telling me?” Fury barked.

“The enchantment has to degenerate on its own,” said Strange, his hands vanishing into his own sleeves. “And I am required elsewhere. I suggest that while you have him, you make use of his extensive knowledge.”

Tony and Barton both insisted later that the whole messy escapade was almost worth it for the look of horrified panic which flashed like the aftermath of a winter storm across Loki’s face at this remark. Plainly he very much did _not_ wish to have his knowledge made use of, and that, Tony said, was reason enough to at least _try_ to get what Rhodey always insisted on referring to as “actionable intel” out of him.

“We’re going to be having _words_ about this,” Fury said, jabbing a finger at Strange. The master of mystical forces did not look particularly intimated by this, and demonstrated why by taking a handful of powder from inside his sleeve and tossing it lightly into the air. By the time it settled on the floor in a mysteriously tidy runic shape, Strange had vanished.

“What a freak,” said Tony. “I mean the guy has some skills but what the hell is going on with that collar? And the moustache? Am I the only person who thinks he makes it look like he haunts elementary schools with a fishing net?”

“It’s the same as yours,” Banner pointed out. “You just have a tiny pretence of a beard underneath.”

“Exactly,” said Tony, tapping the hair in question pointedly. “The soul patch takes it from predator-of-the-pre-pubescent to suave, sexually dynamic _but not illegal_ businessman stroke superhero.”

“Of course there was also that occasion when you caressed a sixteen-year-old in Aspen,” said Loki, from within the circle. “You were drunk. She was overwhelmed. You claimed you thought she was nineteen but even at the time you had doubts.” He kept his eyes closed, but the triumphant edge to his faint smile was almost as disturbing. 

“That was twenty years ago,” said Tony, with considerable effort towards keeping his voice light and unconcerned. “And now she’s the head of software development at Stark Industries and sends me Christmas cards made out of her kids’ drawings.”

He left the room so abruptly that it was as if he’d copied Strange’s exit route. 

Fury peered at the Circle, narrowing his eye, and without changing his expression, barked: “Everyone out! Now!” He snatched at Thor’s chest in a vague movement. “Not you. You have to ask some questions.” Fury at last turned from the motionless, naked, almost holographic-seeming two-hued figure in its circle. “And answer some, too.”

Loki snickered quietly, in the background. Thor sagged, and went to pick up his hammer again.

“Now,” said Fury, addressing Loki with a jerk of his head. “I do not like you. Last time I saw you, you stabbed my principal liaison, murdered untold hundreds of people smashed up my helicarrier, blew up my headquarters, unleashed millions of ugly motherfuckers on flying segways or some shit over New York, bruised Agent Hill’s internal organs, brain-damaged a reputable physicist, and made my favourite Thai restaurant go the fuck out of business thanks to damage costs and PTSD. You are _on_ my shit list.”

Loki listened to the enumeration of his acts with the air of a connoisseur listening to a virtuoso performance from his favourite musician. When Fury paused for breath, or possibly for dramatic effect, he spread his hands in a mockery of wounded innocence.

“I would dearly like to neutralise your weird frozen blue Smurf ass, but since that ain’t a possibility right now,” Fury went on, stabbing a finger through the air in the direction of his captive, “I am going to take all these incomplete intel files I have on all of your bullshit, and I am going to make them so goddamn complete that every one of my personnel can recite your first fucking word in their sleep.”

“I believe it was ‘Thor’,” said Loki. The grim smile he pulled on over this pronouncement was sickly and unconvincing, and looked more like he was trying to hold down vomit than demonstrate his control of the situation.

“You’re going nowhere,” Fury finished, with emphasis. “Now. Thor. You’re in here until one of us comes back. You ask him anything he’s hiding. How he does all his tricks. Everything.”

With this he stormed out, in much the same way that he stormed everywhere, and left Thor standing alone before the circle, with Mjolnir dangling disconsolately from his hand.

“Barton thinks your clothes were an illusion,” said Thor, at last, and he laid Mjolnir on the floor before him. With a little difficulty, he stood behind the hammer as if it were a wall.

“I was in the bath,” said Loki, rolling his bizarre eyes. “Illusory clothes would be unnecessary effort and afford no protection from wayward daggers and the rest of the world’s weather.”

“It is as I thought,” said Thor, with so much relief that it was evident it wasn’t entirely as he’d thought. He examined Loki for a moment, until Loki began to fidget in discomfort. At last Thor added, “Dost thou love Asgard so?”

“No,” said Loki, and, “Don’t ‘thou’ me, Thor. I’m not your friend.”

“Thou _art_ ,” Thor said stubbornly, “my brother. Why take Asgard, if thou loves it not?”

At this Loki put both hands over his mouth, but the words, “If I cannot have Odin’s _respect or love_ , I shall have his kingdom.”

Thor shook his head. “You earned it through trickery, how can you think the people of Asgard will ever love you for it?”

Loki smiled. “According to _you_ , Loki Silvertongue sacrificed himself on the dark sands of a distant, dying world – to protect his brother, his brother’s lover, and the Nine Realms – and to avenge his beloved mother, our queen – in Asgard, Loki is a dead hero. I take care to make sure that I stay both _dead_ and a _hero_.” He stopped, and said to the floor beneath him, his too-long hair forming a cape behind him that reached almost to his waist, “They have far greater love for me dead than they did for me alive.”

“No,” said Thor, “now they pay respect to a memory. Before they loved a man.”

“They loved a figurehead,” said Loki. “They loved your shadow. I stand within truth. I cannot deceive you. They loved your shadow.”

Thor sighed. For a moment there was no sound in the room but the endless background hum of electricity and invisible networks that permeated every inch of S.H.I.E.L.D. When Thor had first learned that at all times tiny invisible messages passed almost unchanged through his body, he had been most disturbed but like everyone else, had found he grew dismissive of the idea with time.

“Thou _art_ my brother,” said Thor at last. “And inside this prison you have no choice but to agree.”

“I am an abducted heir to Jotunheim,” said Loki, making an attempt at staring Thor down, “a Jotun prince raised alongside the alongside the Æsir, but not _of_ the Æsir.” He folded his arms.

“If that were _all_ of the truth,” Thor said doggedly, having unconsciously balled up part of his cloak in one of his fists, “Thou wouldst appear only in cold and deathsome blue like the Jotun, now, here, within your prison, and thou wouldst not fox the eye with thy constant shifting.”

Loki examined his hands with interest for some time. “The nature of family is as important as the blood of my birth,” he agreed, unwilling, and through gritted teeth. He let his hands drop slowly to his sides. 

“Fury wishes to know of your magic,” Thor said, as if Loki hadn’t been standing there and listening to his instructions a moment before. “But your magic is Mother’s magic, and I won’t expose her secrets this way.”

“Too kind,” said Loki, a little dryly. He seemed to be waiting for something, and when it didn’t come he relaxed, ever so slightly, and stood at more ease. 

“How many other alliances do you have like the one you formed with the Chitauri?” Thor asked, suddenly, taking Loki by surprise.

“Few,” said Loki. He winced. “It was formed in desperation at first. The offer of Midgard was hard-won.”

“What do you mean, desperation?” Thor grumbled, leaning over his self-imposed barrier to glare at his brother. “What sort of ‘desperation’ leads one of the Æsir to enter into a bargain with _them_? Your desperate _greed_? Your desperate hunger for power?”

“This may shock you,” Loki said with some difficulty and a great deal of dryness, “but there are forces in the universe more powerful and more indifferent to our fate than those of the Chitauri, and of Asgard.”

“Speak plainly,” Thor warned.

“I can hardly do otherwise. I fell for millennia,” said Loki, sudden steel in his voice, on which he seemed almost to choke. “Once I came from the Bifrost, there was nothing but nothing for a hundred hundred years. I died a few thousand times and was not permitted to remain dead. I drifted beyond the realms of the living and the dead: I saw worlds rise and fall and rise again, only to fall once more. I saw my life written and unwritten and remade as if in the mind of some vast and pitiless god: I knew the inconsequence of all I had known and all that would ever be.” 

He held Thor’s gaze until Thor turned his face to look more closely at the floor. There were distances contained within his stare which shrank the space between worlds into mere miles.

Loki said more softly, “I came to rest on their barren world by chance, weak as the faded ghosts of the long-forgotten, and they would have torn me asunder had I not offered them _something_ I could give them, that I could provide them.”

“And you chose Midgard,” said Thor, with disgust diminished by resignation. 

“You chose Midgard over me,” said Loki. He clawed at his own mouth, then appeared to give up. There was fire in his voice: for a moment he was Æsir through and through, before the cold crept back in. “I thought I might revenge myself by taking it for myself.”

“You are moved too often by vengeance, not kindness,” said Thor, frowning.

“Vengeance got you your woman back and the aether out of her,” said Loki with a snort. “Kindness would have seen her die.”

“Vengeance would have seen thee dead and not imprisoned, and thus unable to render thy services at all,” said Thor, “so stay your hand from striking kindness down, if you are so clever.”

Loki spread his hands. “I am bound to tell you the _truth_ ,” he said, with something flashing in the depths of his eyes. “I am not bound here to please you with lies. If you wanted that, you should not have taken the instrument of my diplomacy.”

“Your _lies_ are no more an instrument of diplomacy than my Mjolnir,” sighed Thor.

“Well that is a matter of opinion,” Loki said, “and you are not well-backed in it.”

At this, Thor looked to the doorway. Finding Steve passing with no real apparent sense of urgency, he called: “Friend, it is now up to you to guard our miscreant,” and left with what might be considered undiplomatic haste.

“So,” said Steve, having planted himself a firm six away from the edge of the circle and relaxed into a standard at-ease position, “no more lies, now?”

“While I am bound,” said Loki, “I am bound to the truth. You won’t like it.”

“No, I think I will,” said Steve. “You see, I’m kinda in favour of a little honesty. People think they can make the world better with white lies, but all that does it open the door to bigger lies. You, I guess, are in love with keeping the truth from people.”

“It has rather more uses,” said Loki, “than blurting everything you know, all at once. Sometimes the retention of truth is necessary. You yourself are a secret weapon.” He looked bored.

“Not so secret anymore,” said Steve, with the beginnings of a rueful smile. He clamped down on this display, and stared at Loki’s unsettling eyes until he could stare no more. “You’re gonna tell me something now.”

“Probably,” said Loki, without blinking. “I don’t appear to have much choice.”

“Why did you do it?” Steve said. Unlike Fury, he almost never put his hands on his hips: now he drew his arms up to his chest and folded them across it, as though he was cold. “I don’t mean all this self-serving ‘I was born to rule’ crap you keep feeding everyone. What’s the real reason? Why did you have to come down here and start hurting our people?”

Loki regarded him as if he was holding down both words and bile, and drew his face into a distortion of a smile that looked more pained and angry than triumphant. He said, “Because your lives are worth less to me than mine,” and not one word more.

Steve stood on guard for the remainder of the day, and neither he nor Loki uttered another syllable to each other.

As the day drew to a close, in a large and as yet unfinished meeting room, a council of not-quite-war was under way. 

So far there haven’t been any further incursions,” said Banner, worrying at his own hair. “Perhaps it really was him?”

“Coulson,” said Fury, over his shoulder. “Go and relieve Rogers. No,” he added, as Coulson left, “if he’s doing it, he doesn’t know he’s doing it.”

“You think Strange got his little magic genie spell right?” Tony asked, around a mouthful of a meatball sub. Everyone had by now learned not to question Tony’s food of acquisition secrets. 

“Listen,” said Fury with surprising patience, “Strange is an asshole. So are you. I call you in because you get shit done in between dancing the fucking fandango on my last nerve. So does he.”

Tony devoted his attention to getting marinara sauce off of his beard.

“So we just sit around on high alert, eating Doritoes in full gear, waiting for more oogly booglies – technical term, Natasha, don’t give me that look – to jump out at us and start fucking our shit up again?” asked Barton. He scratched his head. “That’s cool. I haven’t got past season two of Breaking Bad yet Tony don’t say anything.”

“Speaking of food,” said Romanov, before Tony could finish licking his own face, “how are we feeding our captive?”

“What?” Fury asked, pivoting to stare at her like a cycloptic bird of prey.

“Nothing comes out or goes into that circle,” she said. “He’ll starve.”

“Excuse me if I don’t actually give a fuck about that,” said Fury, with appropriate concern.

“Well I do,” said Steve, coming in. “I’m not comfortable with starving a prisoner.”

“I sure as fuck am,” said Tony, cheerfully. “Okay, hands up if you’re okay with starving the creepy genocidal guy who nearly killed me?”

Tony, Banner, and Barton raised their hands.

“Thought so,” said Tony.

“Hands up everyone who has actually been starved,” Steve said, irritably. He raised his hand. “So let’s not do this. It’s against the Geneva Convention and it brings us down to his level.”

Romanov and Barton also raised their hands. Steve frowned at Barton.

“But you’re okay with it?”

“I’m okay with most things,” said Barton, reaching under the table for something and apparently not finding it despite some concerted rummaging. “Also Tony gives me doughnuts when I agree with him.”

Fury sighed very loudly. Thor said, “Loki is Jotun, and he is Æsir. He could live without food for a hundred years. And _has_.”

“There,” said Tony. “It’s not even a real problem.”

Around noon the next day, after Coulson reported that Loki hadn’t so much as blinked all night and appeared to be either mesmerised or sulking, a hole through the fabric of space and time opened up under Paris, and dramatically irritated the commuters on Line 13.

“Barton,” said Fury, “you’re on guard duty. Tony, we can’t use an EMP cannon on these, we’ll fuck up the electrics on the Paris Metro and I’m not having their rep yelling at me again—“

As one, the Avengers Initiative sniggered. Fury glared at them and the sniggering died down as if its throat had been cut.

“We want a minimum of damages and no, I repeat, _no_ civilian casualties. Barton, when I put you on guard duty you get the fuck on guard duty, don’t stand there looking at me like I’m fucking Beyonce.”

“If you were fucking Beyonce,” said Barton, making for the door, “I’d be filming it.”

“I assume you,” Fury said, “You would not.”

The neutralisation of the giant mecha-suited worm people was a messy but harmless affair – less harmless to the worm people, who popped like balloons full of rotten eggs and proceeded to cling to everything like the aftermath of a very niche porn shoot, but without much in the way of repercussions for the locals outside of the smell.

Pausing only so that Tony and Steve could exasperate the rest of the team by signing autographs for a party of holidaying children from Koln, the Avengers Initiative returned to their headquarters for debriefing.

Romanov, sent to relieve Barton, paused in the doorway of the room which had been given over to containing Loki. She was a little surprised to find that rather than standing and sneering, Loki was pooled up on the floor as if he’d collapsed, his wave of tangled black hair heaped up over his face.

Barton however did not seem concerned by this, and was walking around the circle with his hands behind his back, in a posture Romanov vaguely remembered from one of her colleague’s interminable TV shows, and lecturing.

“I get where you’re coming from, buddy, I really do,” said Barton, “but you can’t blame all your shit on your daddy.”

Romanov very slowly leaned on the doorframe, and folded her arms.

“I mean sure, your Dad didn’t love you. Big deal. Mine broke three of my ribs. Bruce’s did experiments on him,” Barton gesticulated to no one. “Steve and Tasha don’t even know who theirs were – Tony’s dad was too busy tryna make a second Steve or a clockwork mousetrap or whatever to care that he’d made a Tony. I don’t know what the fuck the story is with Fury but there _has_ to be something rotten in the state of Denver – Denmark – you only have to look at the guy – and y’know, apart from your brother and Coulson, whose parents are married and happy and think he’s an administrative aide to a senator, everyone here has issues with their past. But you know what? All of _us_ chose to do something good with ourselves. You chose to be an asshole, buddy, it didn’t just happen to you without you putting your in practice.”

Romanov smiled to herself. 

“Please go away,” said Loki in a colourless voice, from under his hair, on the floor. “You’ve been talking for four hours.”

“Barton,” said Romanov, peeling away from the door. “Do you want relieving or should I bring your box set here?”

“Tricky,” said Barton. “I hate this guy and I am _really_ enjoying getting under his skin now that he’s finished reminding me how he got into my _head_.” He grinned. “On the other hand, I really want to see Season Three, I’m not letting this frosty jerk get the fun of watching it with me, and I ran out of pizza flavour Doritoes two hours ago.”

“You can go,” said Romanov.

“Did you get the whole worm colony?” Barton asked.

“They missed one on purpose so that the science team could dissect it,” said Loki from the floor.

Romanov frowned. “Who told you that?”

“No one,” said Loki. He swept entirely too much hair back from his face with one arm and repeated, in a more triumphant voice, “No one. The question was asked, so I could answer.” He got to his feet, his horrid eyes shining, and wiped his hands clean on each other. His hair had yet to settle and seemed to stand out about his head under its own power. “To speak the truth I have to know the truth,” he said, with a kind of dawning pleasure. “My knowledge is potentially without limit.”

“Great,” sighed Barton. “I’ll go tell Fury.”

“Ask me something,” Loki insisted, as Barton left. “Ask me who they were. Your parents, woman. Ask me how those incursions occur. Ask me how to produce a wormhole, or nuclear fusion.”

“No,” said Romanov. “You can ask me a question, if you like.”

“No use,” said Loki, somewhat petulantly. “No one’s stopping you from lying.”

“But there _is_ something you want to ask me,” said Romanov, as Loki scowled at her. “Isn’t there?”

“Yes,” said Loki, thoroughly annoyed by his own ability not to say. 

“Ask it.”

Loki composed himself briefly and, with a sudden and bloodless smile, said, “Did you couple with your pet archer _after_ I left him? He wanted to badly to find that you could comfort as well as kill.”

Romanov watched him without expression. “Don’t you know?”

“No,” said Loki. The reply was indistinct because he had bitten down on his own thumb to prevent himself from speaking; the compulsion of the enchantment, however, was too strong to allow him this loophole.

“It only works if we ask _you_ ,” Romanov concluded. “Good.”

She turned her back on the captive, and marched herself to the one remaining chair with its one remaining table. She sat at the table, laid her hands palm-down on the table in front of her, like the Sphinx, and stared unblinking into space.

After about an hour, Loki said, “Barton said you chose to do good. He is lying. You chose not to die. You saw the way the odds were stacked and pursued the course that would preserve you in that moment.”

Romanov ignored him as if he had made no noise at all.

“And now you are trapped by fear,” Loki went on, settling back onto the floor in a cross-legged story-teller’s position. “You know that if you turn your back on them they will hunt you down and they will _win_.”

Romanov continued to ignore him.

“Do you ever wonder at the widows and orphans you create?” Loki asked, pulling his knees up a little further and granting an unwanted and unparalleled view of his perineum.

“Do _you_?” Romanov asked, without moving. 

“Often,” said Loki, apparently revelling in this particular truth. “I wonder if the sins of the father outweigh the suffering of the child. And I recall that the universe is vast and indifferent and has no justice of its own, and that death comes in the blink of an eye, that all beings are flawed, and that happiness does not rest on those who deserve it but those who fight for it with the greatest might.”

“And for all your might,” said Romanov, “you are miserable, and unfulfilled.”

“I will never be happy,” Loki agreed with crushing sincerity. “Nor will you. We know too much.”

“It’s your ignorance that keeps you like this,” said Romanov. She closed her mouth into a shockingly straight line for one with such full lips, and was still sitting at her table when Banner came to relieve her some hours later. 

“Any trouble?” Banner asked, as she stood up and stretched in four directions at once.

“Not for me,” said Romanov. She slipped out of the room like a whisper out of a dying man’s mouth.

“Ah,” said Loki, straightening up from his much less balletic slump to stare at Banner with something like anticipation. “The monster.”

“Original,” said Banner, leaning back on the table. “I mean, it’s not like there haven’t been a long list of people who only care about the other guy, you’re hardly the first.”

“It _is_ what sets you apart,” said Loki, spreading his hands. “I too am a monster. I’ve embraced it.”

“Have you?” asked Banner. “You’re not exactly walking around blue and frozen all the time, are you?”

Loki said, “I can hardly undo what I was raised to be. Nor can you.”

Banner snorted. “Well, that was cheap. Maybe if you’d moved beyond ‘what you were raised to be’ you’d see that’s what everyone else does.” He squeezed the bridge of his nose and added, “Anyway. I think maybe the ground-breaking work on Gamma radiation _also_ sets me apart.”

“Stark could do it just as well and twice as fast,” said Loki, putting his head on one side. “All he needs is to stop distracting himself. You think an accident made you a monster, Doctor Banner?”

Banner snorted again. “’All it did was make the monster stronger’. I hope you don’t think you’re telling me something _new_.”

“I can,” Loki said. “I could tell you the answer to every niggling question you’ve ever had.”

Banner said, “You don’t know very much about scientists, do you? We _find_ answers, we don’t consult lunatics posing as gods.”

“I have answers it will take humanity generations to discover on its own,” Loki pointed out, with a smile that was almost enticing and somewhat Mephistophilian. 

“Then generations is how long it’s _supposed_ to take,” said Banner.

“Really?” said Loki, leaning forwards onto the balls of his feet. “You know Barton—“ he tapped his forehead, “—had this impression of you that you were atoning for sins against mankind by trying to reduce unnecessary suffering. I’m pleased to learn that you don’t think that’s as imperative as all that.”

Dr Banner scowled. “What’s in it for you?”

Loki’s smile twitched momentarily. “When you ask for an answer, I have to know that answer in order to tell you. Knowledge is power.”

Banner tapped the side of his own face. “What makes you think you’re going to remember when you’re released from that circle?”

“What makes me _think_ that? No human magician’s magic is that strong,” scoffed Loki, plainly troubled by the wording of Banner’s question.

“It’s an ifrit’s magic,” said Banner, with a note of triumph. “And would you mind covering your balls at some point? No one wants to see your family jewels.”

“Yes I would mind,” said Loki cheerfully, spreading his arms so that they more or less framed his genitals and funnelled the gaze towards them, “and you’re wrong. You may not want to, but there _are_ interested parties around.” He seemed more disgusted than proud.

“You’re full of shit.”

“Can’t lie,” Loki said promptly.

“Doesn’t it bother you?” Banner sighed. “Being naked in front of your enemies?”

“Yes,” said Loki, “but your discomfort makes it all worth it.”

“So this is just a game of gross-out chicken?” Banner asked with another disgusted sigh.

“Yes.”

“Okay.” Banner picked up a tablet from the table, and began fiddling with it, flipping through a gallery. “I’ll play. Would you like to see pictures of the kids I’ve been treating for symptoms of radiation poisoning in the aftermath of your portal-opening antics?”

“No,” said Loki.

“How about... oh yes, we discovered that Chitauri blood causes gangrene if it lands on or near an open wound. Wet gangrene. Want to see a six-year-old girl with wet gangrene in her eyesocket?”

“Not especially,” Loki muttered.

“NEITHER DID I,” said Banner with some force and quite a lot of volume. Loki stepped back carefully, and turned his attention to the boundaries of the circle with some anticipation. “You did that,” Banner said, composing himself to show Loki the gruesome image.

Loki focussed on the picture slowly, and said, “Indeed, that _is_ a six-year-old girl with wet gangrene in her eyesocket. It is not aesthetically pleasing. Rot rarely is.”

“And you don’t feel any kind of responsibility?” Banner demanded, shoving the tablet at him again.

“It _is_ a waste,” said Loki, holding Banner’s gaze. “Where I come from, we took the non-combatants, children, women who weren’t warriors, scribes, and their slaves – as slaves. The warriors we killed, of course. The slaves work in the kitchen, and clean the halls. The scribes tend to Odin’s library – after they’ve had their tongues removed, of course.”

Banner glared at him. “Where _you_ come from is where Thor comes from.”

“Did Thor not tell you?” said Loki, not bothering to conceal his lack of incredulity behind even a veneer of shock – or rather, not able to and this time not caring. “Asgard runs on slaves. Well-fed, long-lived slaves, slaves with great value, sometimes, slaves as beloved as a family _pet_ , slaves who occupy the strange position of being beloved, thinking _property_ , but slaves all the same. Thrall, we call them.” He smiled, and turned his gaze to the ceiling. “Of course Thor didn’t tell you. You people don’t accept the Asgardian truth, that there are those made to rule and those made to serve. You think everyone is created equal, even when evidence says otherwise.”

“What ‘evidence’?” Banner snapped, in disgust. He put the tablet back on the table behind him, and folded his arms. 

“Glad you asked,” said Loki. “You know of...” he rolled his tongue around his mouth slowly, and his eyes towards the ceiling, apparently searching for a word. “Cretinism?”

“Syndrome caused by lack of iodine salts in a pregnant women’s diet, yes,” said Banner, impatiently. “That only occurs in very, very impoverished areas –“

“Where children are born unequal,” said Loki. “Intellectually stunted, impoverished, physically inhibited, sterile. Should they run a nation?”

“There are people who’d say one already has,” Banner said under his breath. Aloud, he said, “Your ‘born to rule’ premise has given us inbred, insane, incompetent monarchs.”

“Human genes,” said Loki, with a smirk. “Asgardian inheritance and mutation correction is a little more ... environmental. And complicated.”

“Lammarckian?”

“Not quite,” said Loki. “But close.”

“You can’t use the existence of cretinism, or-or-schizophrenia, or anencephaly—“ Banner said firmly, “to prove the existence of some sort of pre-ordained ruling class.”

“It proves humanity is too flawed to be fit to rule itself,” said Loki, “if even its ruling elites produce mutants and cretins.”

“That’s _eugenics_ ,” sighed Dr Banner.  
“So? What’s wrong with eugenics?” Loki’s eyes, strange and two-faceted, as they were, glittered with a certain knowing savagery.

“ _Jesus_.” Banner put his hand over his face.

“Don’t humans breed animals for specific traits?” Loki asked, somewhat rhetorically. “What’s wrong with applying the principle to yourselves – or better, allowing a higher race to apply it to you?”

“What’s _wrong_ with it is your assumption that _you_ are a higher race,” Banner said acidly.

“You think humanity is somehow the pinnacle of intergalactic evolution?” said Loki, and corrected himself. “You do. You believe that there cannot be anything higher.”

“I believe,” said Banner, pinching his nose, “that wherever my species stands as a whole, you’ve proven yourself as an individual to be worse than almost all of it.”

“By the standards imposed by humanity,” Loki said in an amused voice. “Yes. It _is_ easy to win when you set the criteria for having won, isn’t it? Worms become great by shitting out soil; snakes become great by striking faster and more venomously. But oh, to be _human_. That must be the greatest of all – says the human. You _are_ disappointing. I thought if anyone might understand the duality of an individual’s nature it might be _you_.” He chewed idly on a fingernail. “But no. You keep yourself locked in a box. In shame. Talk about ‘The Other Guy’, as if it weren’t all _you_.”

Banner said, “Didn’t you try to commit genocide against your own people?” rather snidely.

“I’m sure _no one_ here has any conception of trying to outdo his antecedents in order to impress them,” Loki said with considerable sarcasm. He spat out a fragment of nail.

Banner held his breath, waiting for the fragment to bounce off the containment field, but it only sailed over the perimeter and bounced along the floor tiles. He watched Loki’s face, but the Æsir only glanced at the fingernail with disinterest. 

He said, “Most people manage that without trying to exterminate an entire world.”

“I see how it is,” said Loki with a sickly smile. “You think they’re animals right up until I try to massacre them. Well. Maybe I _can_ do some good in the universe, after all. I could travel about, making a spirited attempt to wipe out this and that, so that your precious humanity FINALLY VALUES SOMETHING BESIDES ITSELF.”

The roar seemed to come out of nowhere, and it came with such force and fury that despite knowing that he was behind an apparently still-effective wall and despite having some of the most effective protection against angry gods of anyone at the S.H.I.E.L.D. headquarters, Bruce Banner backed into the edge of the table.

He knocked the tablet, which slid off, onto the floor, and cracked its own screen. Loki, now in high dudgeon and looking quite unhinged, continued to rant.

“You know only a tiny fragment of what’s out there!” he barked. “Worlds are born and die every passing minute and you won’t care what atrocities they commit unless _I_ am involved? Oh, what _unparalleled principles_ you insects have, what wide-reaching empathy, such a fine and noble race--!” here he spat. It, too, did not halt at the edge of the circle, but seemed to slow as it passed through, landing in an inchoate mess on the tiles just _outside_ the ring of blood and gold.

Banner watched with the same kind of horrified fascination that he’d felt when he reviewed the footage of his father’s old lab tapes in therapy. 

“The worlds out there—“ Loki gesticulated violently around his own head as if his fingers were individual solar system, “don’t need protecting from me, they need protecting from _you! Your_ crippling benevolence would see them moulded into replicas of Midgard’s unattainable imaginings of utopia! Let them – and let _me_ – be what we _are_ , if you’re so vehemently opposed to culling the herd of its mutations – you aching, whining, self-pitying weak excuse for a monster—“

“Help you with something, Banner?” Fury asked, pausing in the doorway. Banner whipped around so fast that Fury’s coat was still in motion when he laid eyes on him.

“If you wouldn’t mind relieving me,” said Banner, glancing back at the panting, now-silent figure in its circle, “I’d like to go relieve myself.”

Fury said, “Find Thor on your way back. I ain’t babysitting this motherfucker.”

“Too bad,” said Loki. “You might learn something.”

“Oh, I plan to,” said Fury, cracking his knuckles as Banner hurried out. “Now, it’s story time here in your personal hell of honesty, and tonight’s story is called How Many Other Artefacts Are There That Loki Is Planning On Fucking Shit Up With.”

“The Infinity Gauntlet,” said Loki in a resigned voice, counting things off on his fingers. “Morrison’s pen, the Heart of Gold, your True Name, Dáinsleif, Tyrfing, Gungnir, the Eternity Drive, the Sceptre of the Arbiter, the Forever Star, the something something of Rassilon which I don’t remember very well, a book, and the Mirror Crack’d In Which The Futures Lie.”

“And do you know where to find all that shit?” Fury asked, folding his arms.

“Apart from Gungnir, which is in the vaults at Asgard – not yet,” said Loki, baring his teeth. “But I have some promising leads.”

“Uh-huh,” said Fury. “So that means ‘no’.”

“I found the Tesseract,” Loki reminded him, “and I survived the thousand deaths of interdimensional space. I _will_ find them.”

“You _will_ get my boot up your ass if you even contemplate trying,” Fury corrected him.

“No, I don’t think I will,” said Loki. “I think you won’t so much as lay a finger on me.”

“That a fact?” Fury snapped.

“Because you’re afraid of me,” Loki went on, with a small and private smile.

Fury answered this with an aggressive and mirthless laugh. “Asshole,” he said, regarding Loki with a steady monocular stare, “the one truth you’d better internalise right the fuck now: I ain’t scared of shit and I most definitely am not scared of _you_.”

“You’re afraid of becoming me,” said Loki with altogether too much good cheer. “You can feel the seed of tyranny in your chest. The ends already justify the means. And you’re not always convinced you’re doing the right thing. There is a tiny voice in your chest that says _this is how they all started:_ bending the truth, making sacrifices that don’t touch you—“

Fury’s expression was the stock image for the concept of ‘unimpressed’. He clocked the Loki with a cold look. “You quite finished?”

“I know what you think,” Loki said, bringing his thumb and forefinger together in front of his face. “ _As long as I still have that germ of fear, I won’t become him_. You think that little voice will save you, but you stifle it every day, and soon it won’t be there any more.” He made a _pwoof_ explosion with his fingers and his mouth at the same time. “You’ll be worse than me, too,” Loki concluded. “I was only ever out for myself. You pretend it’s for the ‘greater good’, and that’s how the really _nasty_ ones get going, isn’t it?”

“Motherfucker,” Fury said evenly, “you did _not_ just compare me to Adolf fucking Hitler.”

“Of course not,” said Loki, with an almost manic grin. He stepped back from the edge of the circle and spread his arms once more. “Despots need charisma, which you sorely lack. You’re the shadowy power behind the throne. But oh, _my_ , what a collection of malleable and obedient charismatic figureheads you’ve assembled! Who will you shove up onto a podium to reassure the masses, when you enslave them ‘for their own good’? Will it be the blond ideal of goodness or the loveable rogue with his disarming flaws?”

Fury tapped his forefinger slowly on his bicep. “You ever get tired of the sound of your own voice, asshole?”

“Only when it’s screaming,” Loki said, with a particularly crazy-looking smile.

“It can be arranged,” Fury said, leaning forwards. 

“Erosion of morals,” said Loki, his smile shading from crazy to dangerous. “Everything you do to me pushes you further into the dark.”

Fury touched his ear. “If one of you doesn’t send Thor in here right the fuck now I’m releasing Tony’s private number to every woman he’s ever slept with.”

“Ooh,” said Loki, appreciatively. 

The threat evidently worked: within two minutes Tony could be heard shouting, “I got him! Don’t do it!”, and within another twenty seconds Thor, dishevelled and bewildered, was shoved through the door with the remains of a doughnut in his hand. 

Thor stared at the doughnut with dawning recognition, whipped about to accuse Tony of treachery, and finding him gone, slumped in defeat, stuffing the rest of the pink-and-white confection into his mouth. This had the unfortunate effect of leaving him unable to offer a verbal protest when Fury passed the duty of guardianship onto him.

He did his best, pointing vehemently over his shoulder after the departed Tony, but Fury only stared at this dumbshow with a deep and apparently uncomprehending frown, and left while Thor was still choking on fried dough and noxious icing. 

“It is Stark’s _turn_ ,” Thor shouted after Fury’s absence.

Loki, who had taken advantage of the disruption to lie down on the floor on his back with his arms behind his head, chuckled quietly to himself. 

Thor gave up, and sat on the table. “How do you find imprisonment?”

“Tiresome,” said Loki, making some movement with his hand that set his hair rustling about. “But one grows used to it.”

“Perhaps, then,” said Thor, by way of a balm on his conscience, “it is that thou wast made to be imprisoned.”

“I was _made_ to succeed to the throne of Jotunheim, and one day destroy Asgard,” Loki corrected him, “and _raised_ to be the right hand of Thor, King of Asgard. We have both rebelled from our paths, brother. Does it not strike you that we might not be _made_ for anything?”

Thor shrugged. “I think Father may have struggled against your fate, but he always knew you would end this way.”

“Actually,” said Loki, “he planned to set me on Laufey’s throne as a puppet king and Mother told him that if he could not control Thor, his own natural son, he could not hope to control his stolen prize, and nor should he think it an honourable path to peace, but instead to tyranny.”

“Did she really call you his stolen prize?” Thor asked, staring down at Loki with disbelief.

“No,” Loki admitted. “She called me her ‘dark little borrowed son’.”

“My shadow,” Thor said thoughtfully.

“If you mean to imply I should be snuffed out were you to vanish,” Loki said, “you are much mistaken.”

“But you _would_ avenge my death,” said Thor.

“I shan’t need to,” said Loki. “You’ll die of disease. An ignoble death that bars you from Valhalla.”

Thor gently rolled one shoulder with his hand upon the socket. “And how long,” he said in an amused voice, “have you been possessed of the power of foresight?”

“Since you put me in your ill-conceived prison, more or less,” Loki said, with a generous smile to the ceiling. “I am rather enjoying this period of incarceration. I’m learning so much.”

“Midgardian phrasing,” Loki sighed.

“—As you have no choice but to answer me in truth,” Thor continued. “What didst thou hope to achieve by falling from the Bifrost?”

Loki pulled his hair over his mouth, but his answer was still clear as a bell. “Escape.”

“Death?”

“In that moment,” Loki said, through his hair, his arms raised above his head in a gesture of futility, “I should rather have died than borne your victory.”

“That,” said Thor gravely, “is both right thinking for a warrior of Asgard, and exceptionally petty.

“Those two things have more overlap then you’d expect,” Loki said, spitting out his hair and letting his arms fall again. “What is ‘honor’ if not codified pettiness?”

“Do not speak so,” Thor complained.

“Can’t help it,” Loki said, to the ceiling. “You should know that the Nine Realms operate on a film of small and comforting lies. Without them we would all be as I was, floating frozen in the face of ultimate truth.”

“Which is?” Thor folded his arms and stared down at Loki, who appeared to have no great desire to get up off the floor.

“That nothing enacted by a sentiment thing is of any ultimate consequence. We are accidents of physics. Magic will die, life will end, the whole of what is will no longer be. All things end.”

Thor fidgeted. “If all is hopeless, why do _you_ strive?”

Loki said, “I am as petty as the rest of you. And cursed with the knowledge of futility, I have grown more restless.”

“Art thou _mad_?” Thor muttered.

“Yes,” said Loki quietly. “Yes, I am. No one could fall so far and so long and not lose his mind.”

“Oh,” said Thor, unfolding his arms and folding them again, uncomfortably. He added in a distressed voice, “But if I knew it to be your own doing, why am I filled with remorse? Why do I feel this great urge to beg thy forgiveness for what _thou_ hast done to thyself?”

“Because you still feel responsible,” said Loki with a shade of anger in his voice, “because you fail to see that I can act as I please without your constraint. You think you drove me to it.”

“And did I?” Thor asked, still visibly and audibly upset. 

In answer, Loki made a very valiant and disturbing attempt to shove his hand down his own throat. Thor spluttered and leapt to his feet, stymied in his rush to rescue his brother from himself by the intervening circle – he drew up short, made a frustrated noise, and punched himself angrily in the thigh.

“No,” said Loki. Finding that he no longer had anything to fight, he withdrew his hand: choked, gagged, rolled over abruptly, and only narrowly avoided vomiting in the tangled black tresses of his own hair. He staggered to his feet, and gave Thor a mean look. “ _That_ , however, was.”

“Perhaps if you did not have such an aversion to the truth—“ began Thor, helplessly. He was rather closer to the circle than perhaps was safe. Outside the headquarters a second night was well underway: within the full-spectrum lights throbbed silently in every in-use area as if day never ended.

“Oh,” said Loki, struggling with his hair until it became a dense and unbecoming braid. “Yes. Do let’s talk about aversion to the truth, my dear adopted thrice-captor. Let us point your gaze first to your blundering, intentional ignorance of it.” He swung the ugly black cable of hair over his shoulder, and strode briskly to the edge of the circle, until mere inches kept him from simply reaching out and tweaking Thor’s nose.

“Loki,” Thor said, with a faint growl.

“What ‘truth’ would you like to hear first, Thor?” Loki asked with an unpleasantly manic gleam. “Your transgressions against the lore and taboos of Asgard? The contents of your own head? Since I am sure your own mind is as much a mystery to you as mine.”

“ _Loki_ ,” Thor said wearily. “Enough.”

“Never enough,” Loki said. “Which certainly-shattering truth would you like most?”

“Does Jane miss me?” Thor asked, with a certain soft sharpness in his voice. 

Loki closed his eyes. “Yes. And she envies her friend. She sees her, glowing with fresh love, radiant with regular copulation and wonders if the heroically _absent_ god is worth the loneliness. The sense of being somehow less than. If a heroic god—“ he opened his eyes and started to laugh. “—if it is _safe_ to fuck him, or if she will die and _that_ is why he holds back, oh Thor, this is too rich! Too rich.”

“Stop,” Thor grunted.

“Can’t,” said Loki, with a peculiar admix of revulsion and delight, “Oh she touches herself at night, she thinks in unforgivably horrid prose of the contours of your body and how wonderful it is to be loved – and then she wakes, _alone_ , and damp-thighed, wishing that she had never found you.”

“No,” said Thor.

“Would you like me to remind you,” Loki said in a sweet, sharp voice, “that while I am here I am bound to the truth?” He lowered his voice and let his face grow hard. “Don’t try to hurt me, Thor,” he said, in the most hushed of tones. “I may not be immune but believe me, for every cut you inflict on my soul I will find ways to flay yours and fill the wounds with salt of every ocean in the Nine Realms.”

Thor regarded him warily. “Were you _always_ like this?”

“No,” said Loki, his mouth twisting into a sad and sardonic smile. “But I fell through the dark places of the world and now—“ he tapped the side of his head, “I have cracked and blackened like a mirror in a fire. I am no longer your shadow. I am my own.”

Thor frowned.

“Face the light and step backwards,” Loki said, rather cryptically. “It is the only way to keep living, once you’ve seen it. No man survives trying to outrun himself.”

Thor said, very sadly, “I loved you once. Or the brother I thought you were.”

“And he loved you,” said Loki. “Tragically, however, he died by degrees while you unwittingly loved his corpse instead of saving him. Oh well.” He bared his teeth in an unhappy mockery of a smile. “Now you’re stuck with _me_.”

“Do you recall,” Thor asked in a distant voice, “those times we played at wolf hunts?”

“I recall that you never let me be the hunter and not the wolf,” Loki said.

“We can’t all change shape,” Thor muttered. “I never speared you. I caught you by the tail. And always me.”

“Yes,” said Loki, dry as the centre of the sun. “Thor the fastest and the boldest. What a happy memory.”

“You know why it was always me.” Thor caught Loki’s eye. “If you are truly blessed with sight that penetrates the lies of memory and the deceptions of the present, you know why.”

“Yes,” said Loki eventually. “But you were wrong to think that. No one else _would_ have caught me.”

“Always so sure of the darkness in every motive,” said Thor, standing back to punctuate the tension which had slowly built. “So sure that no good can come of any kindness.”

“Do you want me to _thank_ you?” Loki asked, twitching a little.

“Do you feel gratitude?”

“I did once,” said Loki, as distant as Thor had been. “I am a different person now. The blackness consumes me and the only rays of feeble moonlight are the opportunities to wound your new friends.”

Thor said in a rather hoarse croak, “I would pay in oceans of my own blood to have the brother I loved returned to me.”

“Touching though your suffering is,” said Loki, “HE IS DEAD. He died without anyone noticing or mourning him. I flung his corpse from the Bifrost. Here stands Loki’s shadow, unmoved by love, ungirded by memory. Be satisfied.”

“You are not so far gone,” said Thor stubbornly. “Thou shalt be recovered.”

Loki rolled his eyes and said nothing.

“Now,” said Thor. “Thou tellst me that thou remember’st –“

“Oh stop _thou-ing_ me,” Loki cried in indignation.

“—the wolf hunts,” said Thor without paying any attention to Loki’s protests. “Thou knowst I shall catch thee by the tail, lest anyone else do so first. Do not be so hasty to turn aside my help.”

“Or they’ll kill me?” Loki laughed. “You know who could? There is a team of thoroughbred murderers out there, with blood on their fists and bullets to drown the mountains and turn the oceans of warm and pink, but they can’t and won’t. Two of them are afraid to. One of them feels sorry for me. Two more seem themselves in me. One of them doesn’t care enough to. The other – _he’d_ do it, but knows he would, and he hates himself for it.”

Thor tallied up on his fingers, and waved a spare digit enquiringly at Loki.

“That’s _you_ ,” Loki sighed.

Romanov came into the room with what looked like but were probably not hesitant steps. She addressed herself entirely to Thor. “Do you want me to take over?”

Thor glanced at Loki, whose response to this interruption was to flop to the floor and cross his legs again. “No,” he said, “You get some sleep. I will be ... content.”

Romanov looked doubtful, but nodded. “Let me know if you change your mind,” she said. “I’ll be down the corridor. Just shout.”

Thor said, “There will be no need.”

“What has he been saying to you?” she asked, as if Loki were deaf and dumb, or simply absent. “He told Bruce eugenics was supportable.”

“You agree with me,” Loki said.

Romanov shrugged. “I don’t go in for moral philosophy.”

“Miss Romanov, please,” said Thor, making a gentle motion without actually touching her. “It is better that I am left alone with him for now.”

She inclined her head again, cast a lingering frown over Loki, and left.

“Fury didn’t send her,” said Loki, watching her go. “She wanted to ask me a question.”

Thor said, “So did I.”

“More?” Loki sighed. He braced his palm against the floor behind him, and angled his face upward. “I am running out of comfortable positions to recline in, Thor.”

His brother ignored this complaint. “Besides the wolf hunts,” he said, “you recall our other games.”

“All of them,” said Loki.”

“All?” Thor asked, hesitant.

“ _All_ ,” Loki said firmly. “And while I am here you had better hope none of your new friends has the wit and insight to ask after them, because discretion is the enemy of truth, and I shall have no option but to expose what it is best kept secret.”

Thor walked back to the table, his back to Loki, and thumped the table-top with a clenched fist. “I love her,” he said at last. “You are aware.”

“You love a great many people,” Loki pointed out. “It is rather a weakness of yours.”

Thor acknowledged his with a grunt. “But she is different.”

“She’s mortal,” said Loki, “and she is recent. That is all.”

“No,” said Thor, his back still turned to the Jotun. “No. There is more to Jane than that.”

“There is more to _her_ ,” Loki agreed, without hiding his disdain. “But not to your love. She is in awe of you, and it pleases you to have awed such an intelligent creature. Your other loves – Sif, Fandrall, that dwarven woman with the golden beard, all of us – know Asgard and its citizens for what they are. We have only seen Thor, first among equals, perhaps, but among _equals_. She sees Thor, divine and other, not only a man but a whole world.” Loki’s tone was strained. “If she were not so profoundly affected by the superiority of the Aesir, you would only have fond admiration for a pretty and spirited girl who thinks of things you do not understand.”

“ _No_ ,” said Thor.

“Your ego loves her love,” said Loki, mercilessly. “ _There_ is your great difference.”

“Shut up,” said Thor, whipping about to wave an unsteady finger at the prisoner. “You lie.”

“I _can’t_.”

“You have broken the magic of this circle somehow and you _lie_ ,” Thor insisted.

“Thor, you knucklehead,” Loki sighed, raising one hand. “If I had any way out of this I shouldn’t sit here telling you fibs. I should take up every weapon in this convenient arsenal and slaughter my foes and, transport permitting, return to Asgard and rule before Odin is discovered and awoken.”

Thor lowered his finger. “If thou canst not lie,” he said, “tell me and tell me plainly, without euphemism nor hint – dost thou still love thy brother?”

Loki’s face contorted horribly, and his hands twitched as if he meant again to try and choke himself rather than give an answer. He said with bitterness and a strangled tone, “ _Always_.”

“And would thou give—“

“Yes,” Loki interrupted. “Please stop.”

“And art thou then envious that—“

For an answer, Loki leapt up and threw himself bodily at the wall of the circle. Thor leapt back as an acrid stench went up in the room, the stink of singed flesh – and Loki fell down again, scorched and panting.

“There,” he said. “I have broken no magic. Stop, please, I beg you.”

“Why?” Thor asked, perplexed down to the soles of his feet.

“Who wishes to see his own weaknesses displayed?” Loki groaned, examining the scorch marks down his left side with a dismal look. “Please, no more.”

“Then,” said Thor, acquiescing, “what sayst thou to this – didst thou intend from the start to have me banished?”

“I had no idea he’d go that far,” said Loki, still prodding at the blackened parts of his forearm. “I just wanted to keep you off a throne you had shown no sign of earning, and perhaps the opportunity to show that I was the better candidate for it.”

“And the _lies_ you fed to me, in exile?” Thor spat. “A chance to prove yourself better, was it?”

“I admit,” Loki said, looking up, “I got carried away. My mind was in turmoil. I was stripped so suddenly of all I had known, cast into monsterhood at the touch of the Tesseract – revealed to be that which I had been taught to hate and to fear – Thor, I believed everyone my enemy, complicit in this vast conspiracy to confound and deceive a monster for the amusement of an even greater monster.” He dropped his gaze to his wounds once more and added without the clarity and youth which had swept over him, returning him almost to his pre-fall conditions: “I know better now, of course.”

Thor began to say ‘good’, frowned, and said, “What do you know now?”

Transferring his scrutiny to a broad, shallow pink wound – which shimmered silver in the holographic duality of his appearance – across his outside thigh, Loki said almost absently, “There is no conspiracy. No one has the competence to maintain one. And I have made enemies through my own actions, not the blood of my birth, and not the machinations of any one-eyed tyrant.”

Thor grunted again. “It pleases me to hear thee say it.”

“It doesn’t please _me_ ,” Loki said. He said draped the ugly, lumpen braid of his hair over his shoulder and began to unpick it. “Why did you offer to stay?”

“If anyone must suffer because of your presence, it should be me,” Thor said somewhat stiffly, apparently hypnotised by the motion of Loki’s fingers within the braid.

“I _can_ tell when you’re lying,” Loki said in a bored voice. “You’ve never been any good at it. You always look constipated and like you can hardly believe your own cunning.”

“Verily?” Thor scowled.

“I believe Midgardians say ‘really’ these days, brother. It is a lazy corruption of ‘verily’ and should suit you.” Loki undid another few inches of black and tangled cable, which flickered to blue-silver and back again as he progressed.

“I had hoped I might at last speak freely with you.”

“Well you haven’t so far,” said Loki, meticulously picking at his hair with one burnt hand and one whole one. “And I have, and I should hardly say you’ve been enjoying it.”

Thor came back to the edge of the circle and sat cross-legged also, mirroring Loki. Loki released his hair and instead put his sharp chin in his hands.

“Now what?” he said.

“Now I wait for your skin to heal,” said Thor, “and perhaps your mind with it.”

“Neither will, in here,” said Loki. He bit his tongue, but as had proven the case several times already, this did not stop him from giving a full reply. “My cure lies far from here and is hard to find.”

“Tell me,” said Thor, “and I will find it.”

“Alas,” Loki said, although he didn’t seem especially troubled, “it cannot be brought to me. I must go to it.”

“Perhaps when you are no longer captive I will go with you—“ began Thor, with sudden eagerness. “For we were always at our best when we went side by side to some common adventure.”

“When I am no longer captive,” said Loki, unblinkingly as he held Thor’s gaze, “[I shall destroy your friends, one by one](https://archiveofourown.org/works/395610), and there will be a reckoning so bleak and foul that those who survive it will say, _Loki of Asgard has killed Time itself._ ”

“Must you?”

“No,” said Loki. “It is not carved into the face of fate. Very little is. But I _want_ to, and I do not want to go with you to the River of Pain and the Mirror Crack’d to make myself a servile whole thing.”

Thor made a disgruntled noise. “You forget,” he said at last, “I have known you since you had yet to learn to speak, much less lie. I know – I know some part of you, some fragment remains who longs to be whole again.”

“I lost _everything_ that I was,” said Loki, leaning forward until the tip of his nose almost protruded over the boundary of the circle, “when I fell for extremities longer than your imagining. Would that I could give you my eyes, that you might see what I have seen. You would not be so certain then.”

“I have faith in thee.”

“I do not share it.”

Thor raised his hand to the invisible boundary in the air and pressed the tip of his finger to it. It stung, and presently began to burn, until he could stand it no longer and removed his hand. “Where is your remorse for what you have done?”

Loki shrugged, and with a great sigh he fell sideways onto his burnt side until his cheek lay on the floor by Thor’s knee. He stared fixedly into some far distant point and said in a hollow voice, “That which has passed is but a dream; that which is to come is but a shadow. That which _is_ may be no more than the snapping of a hundred hundred hungry wolves, tearing at the mind. Why not bring Fury back for some more interrogation?” he went on, without pausing for breath. “I like him.”

Thor started uneasily. “He doesn’t like _you_.”

“I know,” said Loki, smiling at Thor’s knee. “That is why I like him. He isn’t a fool. He has all the makings of an unholy terror. If he weren’t so rigid he would have ruptured the world beyond repair. That man has potential.”

“The sun will rise soon,” Thor said. “Do you wish that I should stay?”

Loki, continuing in his role as a fallen statue of himself, said, “Yes,” in a very quiet voice and, “Don’t,” in a much louder one.

Thor placed the palm of his hand against the boundary until it began to ache. “It troubles me to see you so low,” he said, getting to his feet.

Loki said nothing, but after a moment he ostentatiously rolled over so that he had his back to Thor, and remained thus until footsteps sounded in the corridor.

“Where is he?” demanded Tony Stark, as if Loki might somehow have escaped or vanished. “Thor, get to bed. I have questions for this prick.”

“But—“ Thor suggested, hanging around in the doorway.

“You,” said Tony, stamping to the table. He had taken the unusual step of arriving in full armour, including face mask, something he very rarely did when not testing a suit or on an assignment. He claimed that no amount of adjustment and aircon prevented him from getting a sweaty face with it on. “What the hell did you tell Bruce?”

“The truth,” said Loki without rolling over. “It’s rather a feature of my imprisonment – or did no one tell you?”

“Whatever the fuck you told him,” Tony snapped, “made him lock himself in a containment cell meant for the Other Guy and now he won’t come out.”

“The truth tends to have that effect,” said Loki, waving a hand over his head. “Thor, go. He can’t hurt me in here.”

Tony wheeled about to give Thor the benefit of his blank metal stare. “You’re _protecting_ him?”

Thor shrugged uncomfortably. “He _is_ my brother.”

“Every time you say that I’m more glad I’m an only child,” Tony said, with feeling. Thor left, with an anxious glance over his shoulder. “Alright, Sleeping Ugly,” said Tony. “You can drop the wounded deer act. He’s gone. Get up.”

“Don’t feel like it,” said Loki in a dull voice.

“What kind of bullshit have you been feeding my team?” Tony demanded.

“None,” said Loki with what sounded like laboured forbearance. “Also, they’re Fury’s team.”

“Semantics,” said Tony, dismissively.

“I don’t think Fury would see it that way.”

“Yeah? I think you’re gonna stop lounging about like a lovesick teenager and cooperate with me or I’ll figure out a way to pour three gallons of pee into that cosy prison of yours,” said Tony, without interest. He remained behind the line of the edge of the table.

“Ah, and what a terrible indignity that would be,” said Loki without so much as a twitch. He sounded bored. “What a shame it is that indignity is the least of my problems. Or yours, if you knew.”

“No one’s interested in your gnomic utterances,” said Tony. “So. How much did you learn from your little fucked up collaboration with the Chitauri? Steve says you can’t _help_ but answer me, so –“

“I learnt that no army is as effective as a really _good_ Doomsday Device,” said Loki, still facing away and speaking in a monotone. “But I already knew that.”

He extended his arm in front of him and began to tap the floor by his own face with one index finger. Tony, alarmed by the movement, asked, “What’re you doing?”

“Dying,” said Loki. “Mainly.”

Tony didn’t answer this for a moment. When he did, he said: “Jarvis, run a health check on the freak in the circle.”

“Sir, there is an extremely powerful forcefield in the centre of this room,” Jarvis said patiently, “Which none of your equipment, sensory or otherwise, will penetrate.”

“Enjoy death,” said Tony, with an iron shrug. “I didn’t.”

“Don’t be so melodramatic,” Loki said in the same dull voice. 

“ _Me_?” Tony gave a disbelieving squawk and almost choked on it. He pointed a metal finger at his metal chest to confirm. “ _I’m_ too melodramatic? _You’re lying on the floor sulking because we won’t let you kill people._ ”

“Do you want me to dignify that with a response,” Loki said in a monotone, “or can we just take it as read that you have the crippling self-awareness that you keep trying to cover up with a large and fragile ego?”

Tony walked slowly to the front of the table and sat on it with a clang. “Don’t go thinking that identification means sympathy,” he said, in a warning tone.

“Quite the opposite,” Loki agreed. “From both sides.” He lifted the hand he’d been tapping with, paused, and resumed tapping. “ _New York_ didn’t ‘fuck you up’,” he said at last. “To use your own idiom.”

“Wow,” said Tony, with considerable sarcasm. “What an insight. Tony Stark was already kind of screwed up! You should call Pepper, she’ll shit herself.”

“I _do_ have information you have never given her,” said Loki, still tapping. “So you might not want to do that.”

“Sure you do,” Tony snorted.

“You and I know you went down a particular path when you were fifteen,” said Loki, pausing in his tapping again.

Tony began to sweat a little, but he snorted derisively. “Bluffing,” he said. “Who doesn’t do dumb shit when they’re a teenager? No one. I bet even Steve looked at a girl’s butt or something.”

“Aaron Metz,” said Loki, tapping more slowly and ignoring the invitation to a distraction. “An occasion on which, I am unfortunately required to reveal, sympathy _does_ make a brief home in my otherwise very indifferent and completely _unsympathetic_ heart.” He sped up tapping.

“How’re you doing that?” Tony asked.

“Magic,” said Loki, with infuriating simplicity. He resumed tapping at the original speed. “He was tall and blond and built like a mountain. Swiss-German. Not as rich as you, but then who is? You were terrified of him. He thought you’d make an acceptable substitute for a girl while there were no girls to be had—“

“Yeah, you can shut up now,” mumbled Tony.

“—and now every time you look at Steve Rogers there is an ugly conflict in your heart,” went on Loki, pausing again. “He is your friend. You admire him, love him, and treasure his respect, now that he has proven himself to you. His respect is worth having, you believe. But old blind instinct shrivels your balls. It dries your mouth. Sometimes you’re convinced you must have a crush. Others you know that what you’re feeling is old reflections of fear that etched itself eternally into your soul one term at boarding school.” He sounded almost dreamy, and his taps were slow and languid, distant, disinterested.

Tony recovered enough to say, “Bullshit,” but couldn’t stop sweating. He muttered, “Jarvis, increase ventilation.”

“Sir, your heart rate is greatly elevated. I would suggest relinquishing guard duty –“

“Ventilation, Jarvis.”

“You’re not stupid enough to try to tell me you’re never afraid,” Loki went on. “Or guilty. You take refuge in small truths like this. But guilt at fear which feels like romantic affection because it falls into the inappropriately eroticised memory of trauma – that, that stays under your skin, doesn’t it, Tony Stark?”

“And what do _you_ know about that?” Tony asked, with some difficulty. “Let me guess. Boo hoo. Some big bully put his pee-pee in you and now you can’t stop thinking about beards? Stop projecting.”

“One of the advantages of living in Asgard,” said Loki, tapping at a glacial pace, “is the broader range of possibilities for untoward activities and who these activities can be experienced with. Personally, [I was savaged by someone else’s guilt-stricken memory and a creature that is supposed to grant wishes.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/515587)”

“What, like an ifrit?” Tony asked, starting upright suddenly.

“Yes,” said Loki, and although Tony could not see him, he smiled into his upper arm, “very like an ifrit.”

Tony bellowed into his comms link, “Someone else get in here. I need to see Fury.”

Perhaps to his surprise, Romanov appeared almost immediately.

Tony said, “Take over. I have to get this shit to everyone, now.”

She nodded stiffly, attentive and giving nothing away. 

Loki did not so much as break the pattern of his slow, relentless tapping against the floor by his face.

“Who were they?” Romanov asked, after a long interval. Her voice was not quite steady.

“Loki gave her two names that held no intrinsic meaning, and went on tapping.

“Why did they do it?” she asked, after another wide gap in the conversation.

Loki did not turn a hair. He said in the same spiritless monotone as before, “She died. He did not know what to do with so young a child, and held you responsible for her death. So he gave you away.” He sighed, and added, “Which he has always regretted. After the fine, he became overwhelmed. He believed he had killed you. Sorrow and drink took him to the Moskva and cold water did the rest.”

Romanov nodded, and stood up straight. “How did she die?”

“An infected tear in her uterine structures,” Loki said, with a very faint air of revulsion. “Had they access to penicillin, she would have lived.”

A silence fell.

Loki said, “Barton believes the hospital was an accident.”

“It was,” said Romanov quietly.

Loki said, “He believes it is an accident you blame yourself for. The truth is that you knew they were there, and you went ahead and obeyed your orders anyway.” Loki paused in his seemingly endless attempt to wear down his fingertip against the floor tiles, and said softly, “But unless he asks me directly, I shall not answer him on it.”

Romanov narrowed her eyes. “What do you _want_?”

“Sleep,” said Loki, with a hollow laugh. “I want to sleep.”

Meanwhile, a hasty scrambled Initiative had come together in the main meeting room to hear what Tony had uncovered.

“I think he’s done a deal with either Strange’s ifrit or another one,” said Tony, waving an arm. “I think that’s what he meant. You know what he’s like, he can’t resist gloating.”

Thor raised his eyebrows. “Did he look like he was gloating?”

Tony, unsuited down to the waist but still clad in iron trousers, whirled around. “You do know he’s full of shit.”

“I know he’s stuck in a prison where he can’t lie,” Barton offered, “and last time I saw him he was lying on the floor begging me not to talk.”

“I can identify,” Bruce murmured. He looked cautious, as if waiting for the other shoe to drop, and a great deal as if he wanted to be somewhere else.

“That’s just it,” Tony said doggedly. “I don’t think he is restricted as much as we think he is.”

“Did he tell you something you knew was factually untrue?” Coulson asked, politely.

“Not exactly,” Tony admitted. “It was what he said about creatures that grant wishes.”

“He means a Mara,” Thor said, very uncomfortably, “and they do not. They strike hard, unfair bargains.”

Tony stared at him for a moment, but plunged on. “How do we know he isn’t bluffing?”

“I presume you _have_ put him to the test with questions only you know the answer to?” suggested Steve. “Or matters he’s bound to lie about under any other circumstance?”

“Yes,” said several people at once.

“Strange was pretty damn precise about that spell,” Barton said. “I don’t trust Loki as far as I can throw the Hulk – no offence, Bruce – but Strange hasn’t let us down before.”

Fury eyeballed Tony aggressively. “Your ass better not here got us all have just because you didn’t like something he said,” he snapped, hands rooted firmly on his hips as ever. “That’ freak’s been bowling the worst home truths he can find at each and every one of us. That’s all the fucker’s got. Man up and move on.”

“I don’t give a fuck about his ‘home truths’,” Tony said, his jaw too tight for this to be entirely convincing. “I think he’s given up too easily. The Loki we fought over New York had trick after trick up his big weird sleeves. He’s got a trick now. I know it.”

“He did spit out of the circle without it being stopped,” said Bruce thoughtfully. “Maybe he’s only pretending to be stuck.”

Tony pointed at him triumphantly. “There! I told you!”

But Thor shook his head. “He scorched half his body on the boundary, proving to me that he had no way out – I touched it from the other side, and it is as sound a pen as any on Asgard. He cannot escape.”

“No offence, Thor, but you’re not the sharpest knife in the –“ began Tony.

Steve reached across gently and put his fingertips to Thor’s chest, holding him back nominally if not physically. “No offence, Tony,” he said, “but right now you have no evidence.”

“Review the footage,” Tony insisted. “Everywhere’s on camera. I’ll review it myself—“

Thor looked both startled and uncomfortable.

Fury shook his head and raised his voice even further. “Magic fries the optics, dumbass. I told you to fix it and you said it was an affront against physics.”

“We could check _using_ magic,” suggested Barton.

“Are any of you motherfuckers warlocks?” Fury snapped. “No you are not. Sit down, Tony, unless you have a suggestion that isn’t bullshit.”

The klaxon went off. Tony groaned: Fury stabbed at his ear with his finger.

“Where?” he demanded. “Hunan province where? Did you say Yiyang or Yueyang? That ain’t fucking helpful!” He stood back. “Okay, we have a class three sulphur-spewing shitmonster _somewhere_ in Hunan Province – Steve, you’re on Loki duty, relieve Natasha and fill her in – the rest of you, get your asses over China ASAP. Tony, if I hear one more word from you about genies or ifrits or fucking fairy folk I will kick your ass right out of your face.”

The team dispersed.

“Why aren’t you babysitting?” Steve asked Coulson, as he made for the door at a sedate pace. 

“Oh, I’m needed for diplomatic reasons,” said Coulson, amiably. “I speak better Mandarin than our superior and the Chinese government are a little tetchy about rescue operations which haven’t been cleared with them first.” He gave Steve a demure nod, and added, “Also, the patriotic outfit tends to go over badly.”

Steve broke into a run. He found Natasha sitting cross-legged on the table in the confinement room, and Loki lying on his burnt side with his head on his extended arm and his hair spread around him like a cloak. His face was wet, and when Steve turned to look at Natasha he thought her eyes seemed a little bloodshot.

Loki said, “Katrina’s extraction was mostly successful. She considers the loss of a foot a worthwhile price to pay for her freedom.”

“Miss Romanov,” said Steve, clearing his throat awkwardly, “you are required in China. There has been another breech.”

She nodded curtly, sprang off the table, and made radio contact with the rest of the team before she was out the door. Steve took up her position with folded arms rather than legs, and said, “What were you telling her?”

“The fate of her compatriots from childhood,” said Loki, making no move.

“Why was she _crying_?” Steve demanded.

Loki said, “Once upon a time, a very small girl with no one to protect her had some very frightening hours and thought she would die. In spite of all that has occurred since, Natasha Romanov still retains that terrified child in the locked chambers of her heart. This is what gives her the sympathetic humanity you can still detect beyond her conditioning.”

“And why were _you_ crying?” Steve asked, disgruntled.

Loki stared flatly at him for a while, and said, “I need to sleep.”

Steve said, “Thor said Asgardians could go hundreds of years without R&R.”

“Food, yes,” said Loki. “Sleep, no. Only Heimdall can continue indefinitely without sleep.”

Steve sighed, and changed the subject. “You told Tony about a ... I forget what it’s called... that grants wishes.”

“Mara,” said Loki, flinching. He said in a distant voice, “and they don’t. Common misconception. They take things on the promise of future happiness and what they deliver is rarely what anyone asked for in anything but vague linguistic similarity.”

Steve nodded slowly. “I hear there are several very profitable corporations that work that way.”

“Do your friends know you’re a communist?” Loki asked, then, “They don’t know. I apologise. That was, given the circumstances, very clearly an unnecessary rhetorical question.”

Steve said, “I _was_ a communist. It seems to have proven unworkable. So I’m not anymore.”

“Communism requires stronger spirits and more incorruptible leaders to flourish than capitalism. It needs more planning,” said Loki, as if reciting from a script he knew well and didn’t care much for. “Most of humanity is not equal to the task, the same way that it is not equal to anything that would transform its fortunes.”

Steve said coldly, “Any theory that ends in ‘humanity is worthless and unimprovable’ is a lousy theory.”

“Not worthless,” said Loki, “just not yet ready for selflessness on global scales.”

“I thought _you_ decided what the world really needed was your boot on its throat,” Steve said a little dryly. “Why this sudden interest in my politics?”

“It has occurred to me,” said Loki, “that if I don’t form some sort of alliance in this place I may very well die in here.”

“You’re not forming an alliance with _me_ ,” said Steve. “I don’t side with mass murderers.”

“And yet you happily worked for the U. S. Army,” said Loki.

“Oh shut up,” Steve instructed. “You sound like the internet.”

“In answer to your first point,” said Loki, and sniffed. “Hm. In answer to your first point, I no longer care to take Midgard, now that I have the greater prize. I offer only the truth you already know: communism is too noble an ideal to compete with human selfishness and avarice. Communism might have brought America true equality and seen to it that no one starved and paved the way for a global revolution, but capitalism has given them iPads and bad coffee every eight minutes to take their minds of it.” Loki stretched the arm he lay on, but otherwise did not move. He did not reposition himself. “And the likelihood, as you and I know, is that America would have found her own Stalin, and the starvation and injustice would have worsened.”

Steve bit his lip gently but did not reply.

“The realisation of your personal desires is no satisfaction,” said Loki, stretching one leg and replacing it exactly where it had been. “You are a hero in the service of a status quo you detest.”

Steve said, “Death is not the equality I want to impose on people. So _yes_ , I save their lives when I can. From people like _you_. Freedom is tough, and it doesn’t always equal success. But if people are left alive they have a _chance_ to become better.”

“Or to be exploited. I was quite surprised to learn,” said Loki, who did not sound at all surprised, “that although he has never experienced poverty, Tony Stark has grown concerned with saving people from it.” He finally shifted his gaze upwards, to meet Steve’s face. “More so to learn that you, who have been starving, and cold, and weak – you who are now saved from the hell of poverty – do not use any of your heroic influence to change this system in which so many languish, to change it for anyone _else_.”

Steve gave him a very cold look. “If you really know so much about the damn truth you know I don’t have any more clout than a daytime TV presenter, and no one listens to them, either.”

Loki said, “Did you read all those economic text books for nothing?”

Steve unfolded his arms, refolded them, and said, “You’re beginning to get up my nose.”

“Good,” said Loki. “You don’t form alliances with mass murderers. If I were free I would tear off your skin and nail it back on your bones inside-out. I am Loki of Asgard, Loki of Jotunheim, and I am dangerous,” said Loki, with a little irony, sprawled on the floor with watering eyes, “and I am insane. But while I am safely in this prison: you have studied economics. Town planning. Education theories. You are a relentless reader of anti-capitalist and anti-racist blogs now. You are in effect poised and ready to do your best to make the world better from the ground up, to toil, to labour, to stand with the workers. But you need a leader—“

“It sure as hell isn’t _you_ ,” said Steve, “it that’s where you’re headed.”

“As we have already established,” said Loki in a drawl, “I don’t want Midgard and you don’t like me. But you are a team leader, not a movement leader. You take orders. You are _Captain_ America, not General America, a man in the middle of the chain of command. Who will lead you? Who has the tactical knowledge and vision? Not Fury—“

“I’m not betraying my battalion commander,” Steve snapped.

“He represents the capitalist status quo and the interests of the wealthy,” said Loki. “Tony Stark, for all his philanthropy, does not acknowledge that philanthropy is merely a tool to relieve both his conscience and revolutionary pressure, that he is a very large part of the problem – a truth you will someday permit yourself to acknowledge, for the love of a friend –“

“Shut up,” Steve said, exasperated. “I’m not going to let you out. I don’t know how to and you are several rivets short of a battleship.”

“—or there’s the rest of your team,” went on Loki doggedly, peering along the length of his arm as he lay on it. “But they’re not leaders, are they? All mid-level military, individual operators in an uneasy alliance. All you can do in their company is maintain the world as it is.”

“The cheap trick isn’t going to work on me, Loki,” said Steve. “I understand that you’re angling to weaken the team, don’t you see that?”

“I don’t give a rotten cow for your team,” said Loki peacefully. His eyes, still shifting and unsettled, continued to water without any sign of stopping. This was especially disturbing when Steve saw him in blue, for his red eyes left red tracks down his cheeks in the same opaque hue of blood caught in the light of a flashbulb. “Pepper Potts is the person you want. She has power, drive, and long-term strategy. She would be capable of using Tony’s charm to persuade the masses and her own logic to change the elites. She has a highly strategic mind: all you would have to do,” Loki said, stretching his other leg, “is bring her economics around to meet with her liberal politics.”

“Aren’t you ever going to stand up?” Steve asked, ignoring this revelation.

“One day,” said Loki, “when I’m not so tired. Would you like to know who your father was?”

“He wouldn’t stand by Mom,” said Steve stolidly, “he isn’t worth knowing.”

“A laudable sentiment,” Loki agreed, “and of course, he has been dead for a long time.”

Steve said, “Make yourself useful. How are my team holding up against that sulphur monster?” and fidgeted as if he could bring himself closer to the field of battle that way.

Loki began to tap the fingers of his burnt and pinioned hand across the floor beneath him, and all expression drained from his face and from his voice. “They’re Fury’s team,” he said. “It’s a dragon, and so far civilian casualties are nil. Barton has temporarily lost the use of his subordinate arm after a direct hit from chemical splashback, Tony has an idea which may work and everyone is ignoring him, and Thor isn’t guarding his back properly.”

He glanced up and caught Steve’s eye suddenly, endless tracks of opaque/clear, red/water tears making a strange striped landscape of his face. 

“You have a radio link,” he said, “tell my brother to watch his back.”

Steve frowned, but enabled the link all the same. “Thor,” he said briskly, “apparently you’re letting rear defence down. Get back on it.”

“That’s not what I said,” murmured Loki, “or what I meant.”

Steve disabled the link. “What _did_ you mean?”

Loki resumed his listless drumming. “I mean,” said he, slowly, “that his connection to me is slowly earning him the mistrust of one of his supposed comrades.”

“Bullshit,” said Steve, and turned pink. “Damn it.”

Loki heaved a great heavy sigh, and rolled over so that his burnt side faced the ceiling and his back faced Steve. Steve guessed from that the conversation was over.

Three hours later, when Coulson relieved him, Steve asked how it had gone. Coulson replied in Mandarin and made a so-so gesture, leaving Steve to struggle along to a debriefing for an assignment he hadn’t been on.

“At least,” Tony said, as Steve came in, “we know how the breeches are being repeated, even if we don’t know who’s doing it or why.”

“We do?” Steve asked.

Bruce held up a fragile-looking lotus-shaped construction of matte black material. “When it’s on,” he said, “it rips through the sides of dimensions like a hypodermic. When it’s disabled, it sends out a message to the next one in the array, which keeps cycling through dimensions until it hits one with life in it. That’s why the gaps are uneven.” He looked surprisingly modest. “That’s about all I’ve managed to get so far.”

“There are a lot of dead dimensions?” Steve hazarded, taking a seat. He glanced around him: Tony had dents in his suit, Barton had his arm in a sling, Natasha had masonry grazes on her face, and Thor had dark rings around his eyes. Only Fury, resplendent in unchanging irritation, and Bruce, apparently protected by the Other Guy, appeared to have made it through unscathed. Steve felt a twinge of guilt in his breastbone.

“Millions,” said Bruce. He lowered the black lotus onto the table gingerly. “This is a very sophisticated piece of equipment.”

Selvig entered the room, looked about him, and said with a kind of nervous intensity, “Where is it?”

Bruce pointed at the table, and Selvig’s face fell.

“I have no idea what this is,” he sighed, picking it up. “If I may?”

Fury made shooing motions towards the door: Selvig left with the lotus.

An unspoken answer to the problem hung heavily in the air, along with the unmistakeable odour of sulphur, clinging to almost everyone in there.

“We could—“ Thor began.

“No,” said Fury.

“He would know,” said Natasha. “I don’t see how else we’re going to get the information.” She looked, Steve thought, almost apologetic. It did not look normal on her, and it made him uncomfortable.

“Absolutely not,” said Fury, even more emphatically. “I ain’t giving that motherfucker access to knowledge like that.”

“Um,” said Steve, hesitant. He half-raised a hand. “There are a lot of things he seems to know now without anyone asking him, sir.”

“Alright!” Fury barked. “But we are _all_ going to stand in there and interrogate that goddamn nuisance. I don’t want him focussing on anyone and trying to undermine them.”

When they arrived at the holding room, Coulson had crouched down beside the circle and Loki was still lying on the floor, with his back to the man and to the door.

“The truth gets stronger,” said Loki tonelessly, “as I get weaker. That’s why. Go away.”

Coulson straightened up and acknowledged the arrival of an entire team with only slightly widened eyes.

“You,” snapped Fury, never one for niceties even when they were required and very much not one for pleasantries when dealing with his enemies. He plastered his hands on his hips, pushing his coat back and out in great wings of black leather, “How the hell are these breeches happening?”

Loki said, “Transdimensional gimlets with relay triggers and you already knew that,” in a dull voice, and paid no further attention to the rest of the situation. He acknowledged no one. “I would like to sleep.”

“Tough shit,” Fury said, “I would like to stop being showered with transdimensional boogymen. Who in the hell planted these things?”

“Someone with a sick sense of humour,” said Loki, and he pulled a large hank of his tangled hair down over his face.

“Motherfucker, if you don’t show some fulsome-ass cooperation I will see to it that you never sleep again,” said Fury, with ruthless impatience. “Now I know you don’t give a shit about our little problems, but I promise you, if you make this any harder than it has to be I will make the rest of your goddamn life harder than you can stand.”

“I’m going to live for at least another ten thousand lifetimes,” said Loki without inflection. “So perhaps you’ll excuse me if I’m incredulous about that claim.”

“Who. Is. Responsible?” barked Fury.

“Xen,” said Loki.

“Who the fuck is that?” Fury demanded. “Don’t dick me about.”

There was a pause during which Loki appeared to stop breathing, or to breathe so shallowly that the movement was invisible. Thor started forward, and Steve – beginning to feel that this was his principle function on the team – put out a hand and caught him by the arm, shaking his head.

“Xen is a pan-dimensional affinity with a taste for connection,” said Loki. “It finds the idea of unity amusing and irresistible.”

“And this Xen is trying to get us to unite by throwing monsters of the week at us?” Barton asked, adjusting his sling. “That’s pretty fucking dumb.”

“As far as Xen is concerned,” Loki said in a near-whisper, “the barriers between realities are an unsightly inconvenience preventing the unevolved from learning to love their neighbours, which it considers to be the finest joke imaginable. It believes it is doing you a very amusing favour.”

“Bullshit,” said Tony.

“Why do you bother coming in here to ask me these things,” said Loki, after a rather laboured breath, “if you won’t accept the answers?”

“I don’t like this,” Thor rumbled, pushing gently against the force of Steve’s hand.

“ _You_ don’t like it,” Loki said, with a faint and bitter laugh.

“Right,” Fury said, cutting across the conversation. “How do we stop this ... Xen ... from blowing his fucking hilarious holes in our reality?”

“You are going to need to release me,” said Loki. 

“I knew it,” Tony blurted, stabbing a finger at Loki’s unmoving figure in vindicated triumph. “I _knew_ this was coming.”

“Not a snowball’s chance in hell, asshole,” Fury snapped.

“I am aware that Strange himself cannot release me alone,” said Loki, as if he were completely indifferent to whether or not he did, “but I am also aware that if Xen cannot be given a reason not to, it will leave your world in tatters and your populations decimated, and in all probability I will die here, with you, when this place is obliterated.”

“And how is me letting your ass out going to stop Xen from fucking this dimension to pieces?” Fury demanded.

“I know how to find Xen,” said Loki. “I can be compelled to share this knowledge, but no human would ever survive on Xen’s birth world. Only Thor and I could withstand the cold.”

“Then Thor can go,” said Fury sharply. “He doesn’t need you to hold his hand.”

“I beg your pardon,” Loki said, again indifferent. “I didn’t think you’d want to entrust a diplomatic mission to as blunt an instrument as my brother. By all means send Thor – it makes no difference to _me_ when I die, after all.”

Fury shot a glance at Thor. “Think you can handle this?”

“No,” said Thor.

“Wrong answer,” said Fury. “The fate of the entire world rests on your shoulders, you’d better fucking handle this.”

“I cannot,” said Thor. “I do not have Loki’s way with words. I would offend or confuse this Xen, and doom us all. It is Loki’s silken tongue you need.”

“It is a moot point,” said Loki, with a kind of terrible satisfaction. “You can’t let me out. We’re all going to die here. _I’ve seen it_. Ha. Ha. Ha.”

“Shut up,” said Fury, irritably.

“YOU DRAGGED ME INTO YOUR PETTY MORTAL SHIT,” roared Loki, suddenly on his feet at last. He threw himself at the boundary of the circle, and the smell of burnt flesh filled the room. “IF DIE NOW I’M NOT DOING IT WITH _YOU_.” 

“Stop—“ Thor pleaded.

Loki barrelled into the side of the circle again and once more there was a pungent scent of charred god.

“Jesus,” said Bruce, slightly taken aback.

“Yeah,” Steve muttered, looking uneasily at Thor.

“Get Strange,” Fury told Coulson. “I don’t care what you have to do, just _find him_.”

During the profoundly distressing two days that it took for Coulson to get into contact with Dr Strange, Loki did not cease in hurling himself physically into the esoteric equivalent of an electric fence; Thor did not cease in pleading with him to stop in increasingly frantic tones, and there were three breeches which had to be dealt with, consecutively. 

On his arrival, Strange was hailed with relief and near-desperation. They convened in the room of Loki’s imprisonment, looking worn and worried. Natasha had a black eye. Thor was shaking. Everything smelled strongly of burning: rumours were circulating headquarters and most of them were crazed. 

“I see you’ve been coping admirably without me,” he said.

Coulson explained that he had briefed him on the problem. The whole team turned to Strange with an expectant look.

“I believed it impossible,” said Strange, slowly, “but your man Coulson here informs me that you hold the Volume of Distances.”

“How’s that going to help?” Steve asked.

Loki stopped hurling himself at the wall of the circle and collapsed onto the ground again. The sudden absence of movement made everyone turn briefly around: he looked in bad shape. Thor winced, and made another abortive movement towards the prison circle, only checked in his rush by Steve’s patient arm.

“The Volume of Distances contains, among other things, a great many reversals of incantations,” said Strange. “One of which will perhaps allow me to undo the holding, if not the compulsion to truth.”

Fury sighed. “Coulson, go get it.”

He returned quickly, carrying a surprisingly small book.

“A ‘great many’?” Barton said. “That’s smaller than the Reader’s Digest.”

“Reading incantations from here,” said Strange, with a slightly avaricious tone in his unctuous voice, “is done with the mind, not the eye. It is a key to a place of knowledge, not a repository.”

“Did anyone understand that?” Barton asked.

“No,” said Tony. 

Strange raised one arm above his head, cupped the volume in his hand, and said something which sounded like a record being played backwards somewhat forcibly. 

When he had finished, there was no Strange, only two Lokis, identically dressed in his ceremonial armour, but without his helmet: his hair was trimmed and tidy just above his shoulders, his skin whole and unburnt, and his cheeks dry and unstained. Then there was only one Loki, his eyebrows raised and the Volume of Distances in his hand.

“Do you people _never_ learn?” he asked, smirking.

“I _knew_ it,” Tony groaned.

“ _Why_?” Thor sighed.

Loki waved the Volume at them all as if the answer was very simple. “If it is _any_ consolation,” he said, without sincerity and a snigger, “I _was_ placed under a geas to know and speak only truth. I needed the insight it allowed me in order to use _this_.” He brandished the book again. 

“Wait,” Barton said, holding up a finger, “is or isn’t there a Xen?”

“Xen is what they call me on the world where the black lotus devices are constructed,” said Loki, cheerfully, and with a definite air of being pleased with his own cleverness, “and everything I told you is what they _believe_ to be true of Xen, there.” He showed his teeth. “The ‘truth’ is a tricky and ill-defined thing and it is worse than outright lies when you’re predisposed by your own _belief_ in The Truth to believe it.” 

There was a collective groan, and Bruce twitched.

“And I wouldn’t try to use those black lotuses – they will self-destruct now I have this.” Loki waved the Volume again.

“But—“ said Thor, frowning.

“You are impossibly stupid,” said Loki, with an empty smile. “I tried to warn you.”

Bruce twitched again. Steve, who was beginning to get used to this, gently restrained him with the tips of his fingers. 

“Oh, and the ifrit was real,” he added, “you can’t enchant yourself. If _any_ of you knew _anything_ about magic that should have been a huge red flag of warning. But you persist in not knowing and now you have paid for it.”

“Is _no one_ going to seize this prick?” Tony cried. “Okay, poor choice of words, but—“

“And now, as I promised,” said Loki, his voice dropping to a threatening purr, “ _there will be a reckoning._ ”

With these words, he snatched Steve by the throat, uttered a few strange syllables, and vanished.

“He has a tracker on him,” said Tony, his voice tight. “It’ll be okay. We’ll find him.”

No one else seemed very convinced.

**Author's Note:**

> To find out what happened to Steve, read "Unlocking". To find out what happened with Loki and the Mara, read "A Little Knowledge" (but under advisement as both are a lot less Teen rated than this).


End file.
